Two exhibitions running until 19 July at Lafayette Anticipations approach the home as both a crime scene and a sanctuary: Diego Marcon constructs a cinema around the norms and taboos that govern human relationships, and around our helpless faith in moving images, while Ladji Diaby turns discarded furniture into instruments of spiritual resistance.
Walk into Lafayette Anticipations and find, in the middle of the building, a cinema. Four short films by Diego Marcon are on show: The Parents’ Room (2021), Dolle (2023), La Gola (2024) and Krapfen (2025), each rooted in the domestic interior, each borrowing from a different popular genre. The musical, burlesque, melodrama, horror. The first question that settles over you: is this AI? The figures on screen move and feel with an unsettling precision. And then the penny drops: every face is a prosthetic mask. Every animatronic body was built by hand, jointed and motorised, then filmed. The window with its falling snow exists, in meticulous three-dimensional reality, as a built set. What reads as digital was always, underneath, physical.
Born in Busto Arsizio in 1985, Diego Marcon has spent years developing a practice lodged between experimental and popular cinema and using it to destabilise the viewer’s confidence in the moving image. As curator Myriam Ben Salah has put it, he treats film not as a vehicle for storytelling but as a machine – of time, sound, and image – that he rewires from the inside.
Among the four, Dolle (2023) stands out for its absurd tenderness: two animatronic moles, oddly loveable, locked in a circular exchange that refuses to resolve. Then there is The Parents’ Room (2021). A man, sat on the edge of an unmade bed, begins to sing, confessing, in a soft musical register, to the murders of his wife and two small children, and to his own suicide. One by one, the family appears and joins the song, each recounting their own death in turn. The prosthetic faces lend the figures something between a puppet and a corpse. The contrast between the gentleness of the form and the horror of what is being said holds you in your seat.
Ladji Diaby was born in 2000 and grew up in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb south of Paris where, as a child, he would accompany his mother to flea markets. That early education in what gets thrown away and what gets kept runs directly through the installation upstairs at Lafayette Anticipations. The materials are furniture salvaged from pavements and second-hand markets, each piece reworked, opened up, filled with objects whose owners are gone and whose stories are unrecoverable.
Among the pieces on view: dog-show trophies and display cabinets in the manner of 18th-century chinoiserie. The choice is precise. These objects carry the fantasised elsewhere that, in a different register, authorised violence and predation. Diaby does not denounce; he displaces, treating the furniture as a field of friction where emotional, economic and spiritual values rub against one another without resolution. The dog trophies crystallise for him the absurdity of the relentless pursuit of self-improvement, a quest that is, by nature, doomed to frustration.
The title of the exhibition “Who’s Gonna Save the World?” is a joke of sorts, or that is how Diaby frames it. The question is, for him, less interesting than a different one: how do you re-enchant it? His answer, arrived at through years of collecting and assembling, through his mother’s spiritual relationship with ordinary objects, is that transformation happens at the level of things, small, overlooked, discarded things, and that it cannot be the work of any single person. It is, by necessity, collective. The result is an installation of unusual warmth and political precision. It does not argue. It accumulates, until the weight of the accumulated becomes undeniable.
Diego Marcon: Prom and Ladji Diaby: Who’s Gonna Save the World? are both on view at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 19 July 2026. Wednesday to Sunday, 11am–7pm.
