VILLA MARLENE – A project by Francesco Vezzoli

© Charly Gallo - Centre de Presse

“Everything that you will see in this exhibition is just pure fiction...”

And for good reason: Marlene Dietrich never lived at Villa Sauber... but Francesco Vezzoli, who has devoted his work to the legendary diva for more than 15 years, decided to take over this historic residence and redecorate all of the rooms. Each of them is now adorned with pictures, posters, films and sculptures of the actress, confirming her status as an icon of glamour.

“I took over this villa in order to transform it into a museum of commemorative artefacts: of course everything is fake, but it is as if it were all true.”

 Visitors will be able to admire a series of portraits that the actress, in a surfeit of narcissism, might have commissioned from the era’s great artists: Modigliani, Matisse, de Chirico, Magritte or even de Lempicka.

The video, Marlene Redux (2006), which is shown at the end of the exhibition, could be its manifesto. This short feature is inspired both by Maximilian Schell’s documentary about the actress and by the famous US TV series, True Hollywood Story. Between fake interviews and excerpts from non-existent films, we discover, through an ironic, romanticised view, the life of Francesco Vezzoli, a young artist seeking to make it in Hollywood in a mockumentary, where he imagines a hypothetical link between Marlene Dietrich and Anni Albers – according to him, the two most committed and spirited women of their era.