Diego Marcon: La Gola

La Gola (The Belly), Diego Marcon’s film commissioned by the Kunstverein in Hamburg, revolves around the correspondence between Gianni and Rossana. The two characters are portrayed by hyperrealistic dolls with digitally animated eyes and facial expressions. The combination of human voices, analogue dolls, and digital (post-)production brings forth hybrid characters whose status between analogue and digital defies clear distinction. The score of La Gola is composed by Federico Chiari and recorded on a Pietro Corna organ in Bergamo Cathedral.

Everything—the figures, the relationships, the narrative structure, the genre-specific conventions—move toward a climax, while being in a state of irresolve as inner and outer worlds merge in a camp and overinflated magical realism. Although the cast of La Gola is confined to two protagonists, the film reveals a tangled web of relationships characterised by plight and jouissance. In frontal close-ups set in daylight to the sound of chirping birds, Gianni lauds the skills of his cook Baptiste; his life’s aim is seeking heightened forms of pleasure. Rossana, on the other hand, writing in nocturnal darkness shaken by increasing thunder and lightning, describes her mother’s physical suffering and progressing illness. Rossana’s life is defined by the absence of pleasure. However asymmetrical their relationship, they share the inability to recognise the written language of the other as real physical experience.

La Gola avails itself in auteur conventions, where dialogue comes to bear as only one of several formal filmmaking devices and instruments. Gianni and Rossana are foils, gendered stereotypes of cinema history charged with affect but doomed to make their way from one stage set to the next in an overdetermined and stylistic, but ultimately plot- and actionless vacuum.

Produced by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for BIM’24, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Kunsthalle Wien, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York; with the support of Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC) and Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain de Genève (FCAC).

Artist talk, Diego Marcon and Marina Xenofontos: May 4, 2pm
Director’s tour with Milan Ther: May 7, 6pm
Artist talk: June 6, 7pm, with Camilla Romeo, Executive Producer of La Gola, in conversation with Milan Ther