Diego Marcon, excerpt from La Gola, 2024. Digital video transferred from 35 mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound, 22:22. Courtesy the artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunsthalle Wien; and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for BIM’24. Collection of The Vega Foundation.

Diego Marcon’s La Gola, translating to “the throat,” is an epistolary film that demonstrates the ability of language to convey powerful emotion when expression and visual indicators are left implicit. The film follows an exchange of letters between two characters, Gianni and Rosanna. One character describes a sumptuous banquet while reminiscing on the “art of flavour,” while the other recounts visceral details of the progressive decline of her mother's health.

La Gola captures its audience through Marcon’s poetic and calculated employment of vernacular and auditory devices. The work enforces a sensory overload through Marcon’s deliberate language choices, archetypal French overture music, and illustrative descriptions of tastes and scents. The film is an exploration of melodrama, using the stark difference between the two stories to create a cinematic narrative. Made using a combination of digital effects and mannequins, La Gola shifts the visual focus that has become synonymous with Marcon’s artistic practice towards a greater emphasis on language as a structural and narrative tool.

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