The Madre, Donnaregina contemporary art museum in Naples presents a solo exhibition by Diego Marcon, curated by Eva Fabbris and Andrea Viliani and dedicated to the film The Parents' Room (2021), which premiered in July at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs of the Festival of Cannes. The work will become part of the permanent collection of the Madre museum.

The Parents' Room is an ambiguous tragic narrative. The work follows the story of a man, sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, who sings about the murders of his wife and two children, and then about his own suicide. The scene is quiet; the snow falls slowly in front of the open window and the chirping of a blackbird melodically accompanies the story. The juxtaposition of the domestic environment, the subtle deformity of the characters and the implementation of their twisted destiny arouses confusion and repulsion. Some of the elements in the film are made in CGI, the actors wear prosthetic masks: these are details that make the scene disturbing. In particular, the masks, characterized with subtle hyper-realistic exaggerations, like in a cartoon, give the characters a puppet look, making their movements similar to stop-motion animation and triggering a further alteration of reality, characteristic of Marcon's work. .

The event evoked in The Parents' Room is therefore clearly a staging, in which the least ambiguous element is the realism of the setting. In the installation conceived by the artist for the presentation at the Madre, the ordinary bedroom in which the scene takes place subtly expands in an architectural continuity between the domestic interior of the film and the rooms of the museum, creating a disturbing allusion the possibility that the audience is in the same space, or in a space similar to that of the characters in the play. This element of involvement is further reinforced by the structure of the film as a loop, which alternates the vivacity of the story with a phase of almost sculptural immobility and a prolonged silence: in the ambiguous succession of these two moments, the mystery of what really happened to the protagonist family of this work is never resolved.