Diego Marcon
FORZA CANI

"FORZA CANI", which could be translated as “Go, dogs, go !” is the performative title that Diego Marcon has chosen for his exhibition at the Consortium Museum, which includes a photograph, ten ceramic sculptures of dead dogs, and a 16mm film projected on a loop.

The exhibition unfolds according to a mechanism with its own logic: a purposeless regularity in which the elements persist, delineate the spaces and voids, perpetually coming back around again.

The title is all the more ironic—or paradoxical—in that it seems to announce a life force whereas these dog carcasses are in fact immobilized, fixed forever in their dual condition as corpses and sculptures—at once realistic and decorative, shiny and polychrome.

The brutal objectification of these adorable domestic creatures is one of the tragi-comic devices of the mis-en-scène, meticulously conceived in terms of rhythm, scansion, and score. Hung on the walls, the sculptures define a space—between image, object, and representation—loaded with a domestic and cultural history (scenes of hunting or sacrifice, anatomical studies, still lifes), cinematic narratives (from Lassie to Rin Tin Tin), and emotional clichés. 

Beyond these formal procedures, Marcon places us in an undecidable in-between space, forced to imagine the pathetic, violent, and repetitive vicissitudes that have led to the serial deaths of these poor beasts.