FRITZ

Single-channel video CGI animation color sound loop

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and co-produced by Sadie Coles HQ London and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York for the exhibition Nebula 2024. © Diego Marcon. Courtesy of the artist; Fondazione In Between Art Film; Sadie Coles HQ London; and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York

DIEGO MARCON

is an artist who centers his moving image practice on the investigation of cinematic archetypes, combining theoretical and structural approaches to filmmaking, with the sentimental attitudes of popular movie genres. Marcon has exhibited internationally with recent solo presentations at Kunsthalle Basel; Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; and Museo MADRE, Naples. Recent group exhibitions include Biennale Arte 2022; Mudam, Luxembourg; Museo MACTE, Termoli; and Fondazione Prada, Milan. His films were presented in festivals such as Quinzaine des cinéastes, Cannes; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Viennale, Vienna; Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal; IndieLisboa, Lisbon; and BFI London Film Festival.

Inside a woodshed illuminated by an autumn dawn, a young boy is jodeling. Traditionally employed in the Central Alps to call the cattle back to the barns or to communicate with distant villages, Fritz’s jodel is instead a muffled call and a lugubrious requiem, accompanied by other voices coming back from nearby valleys and mountains. The neatness and simplicity of the scene may appear as perfectly true and reassuring as it does absurd and disturbing. Details such as Fritz’s fleece and joggers partially covered in grass and mud stains, which more or less ground the story in a plausible reality, are too small to make up any authentic subjectivity for him, nor do they provide any explanation for the strange situation he finds himself in, or for the weird things he does, such as kicking the wall to make himself spin around a little. Suspended between childhood and adulthood, being in the world and being worldless, humanity and puppetry, Fritz looks like an irreparable character who––together with his song pulled back to vocalizations and guttural sounds––is dead tired, exhausted by the theater of life and its expectations of meaning. Mixing drama, comedy and the grotesque, while also evoking literary figures such as Pinocchio, this short but never-ending sketch builds up a reality where facts are hyper-real tricks that create space around an abyss of horror and astonishment. At the same time, its eerie atmosphere gives this polyphonic tale an unexpected lightness that compassionately ironizes the communal forms of sadness and isolation that mark out our own time. The work was realized with the artist’s long-term collaborators, animator Diego Zuelli and musician Federico Chiari. The jodel was performed by Coro Genzianella, an all-male Italian folk choir founded in 1961 in a small mountain village in the Trentino-Alto Adige region.