Diego Marcon

"In general when I work, it's not like I'm looking for something and I find moles, it's more like moles find me, they pop up. I don't know why, I just try to remain open to these kinds of visit"

- Chris Fite-Wassilak

I first met Diego Marcon on an island. We were on a residency at Lake Vassivière, in France, and he had begun to film clouds on Super 8 and to hand-develop the film in his residency apartment’s shower. The resulting silent short loop, Pour vos beaux yeux (For Your Beautiful Eyes, 2013), is a futile attempt to capture shape-shifting clouds, but also a brief meditation on seeing and film, on how light can be filtered and held for a moment, to be passed on. While on the island, Marcon introduced me to his earlier SPOOL series (2007–12), where in exchange for transferring someone’s homevideo recordings from their tangle of Hi8, MiniDV and VHS formats to digital, the Italian artist was given permission to use the footage to create his own videos. The resulting edited shorts were shaped around what type of film genre Marcon determined the principal camera- person – often a listless or doting dad – had subconsciously drawn on to direct their footage: one becomes a roving road movie; another a tense horror film. Cinema’s influence, Marcon suggests, is something beyond the direct experience of watching, but imbibed and distributed into how we imagine the world around us.

Marcon has since developed a series of striking short-films that make further use of the mechanics of cinema and the histories of cinematic effects, such as animatronics and CGI, as well as the narratives and tropes that have been produced by them. Imagine a brief aside in a Disney feature-film stretched to an eternal loop, drawn out so that we might fully appreciate its textures – but in being asked to stay with and dwell in that moment, we might also start to recognise an existential unease that has always been there.