Why Can't We Live Together?

Why Can't We Live Together? is a project by Matteo Bozzi and Claudio La Mattina on view in London from 5th to 7th of July 2024. Through diverse media—sculpture, performance, film, and photography—the duo explores human relational dynamics, staging the reciprocal interactions of bodies, objects and space. It is the duo's first solo exhibition, organized and curated by Juliette Miller and Athina Sanvido.

Why Can't We Live Together? Matteo & Claudio delve into this ethical question through a work of art that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. The exhibition brings together the different aspects of the duo's practice and the community they have engaged with to explore social, political and artistic relationships. It weaves together photography, sculptural work and a short film set in another space and time, where images are sculpted to create a sensory dialogue.

The story begins in Italy, 2022. Naples is a crossroads city, full of emulation, trickery, and creativity. It vividly inhabits the interstices of the polis, which Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis described as porous in 1925. Why Can't We Live Together? is situated on the common ground of the public and private, the inside and the outside, of you and me. In the Ex-Asilo Filangieri (L'Asilo), a self-governed space that is part of the network of Neapolitan Commons, Matteo & Claudio expanded this nexus, inspired by Bourriaud's theory of Relational Aesthetics. For two months, they conducted a participatory laboratory to foster creative conviviality. Alongside the Asilo's community, they invented a sensory language to share their story, inspired by the Neapolitan Smorfia, a traditional book of dream interpretation used as a guide to inform numbers in the Neapolitan lottery. They created a visual lexicon, composed of sixteen cardboard sculptures, ambiguous in their function, serving as shells to inhabit or costumes to wear, inviting us to rethink our relationship to space and to others.

The story continued when the duo returned to Naples in November 2023 to expand the project into a short film. They transformed their «convivial Smorfia» into a new narrative structure, shaping an iconographic space through visual metaphors. The film's mobile scenery invents new ways of relating to each other. The concept of conviviality is constantly rethought through its contradictions—why can't we live together? The question remains unanswered. Can't we, really? In the story, time is suspended; does it matter as long as we are here together? By questioning the impossibility, Matteo & Claudio suggest how different it could be. They explore the desire for communal living, embracing the intransigence of body language. Unclad in space, bodies reveal new ways of interacting. Nude bodies act as primary senses, emphasizing sincerity. The gaze rediscovers the triviality and fragility of the naked body. Movements choreograph everyday gestures, reflecting the uncertainties of our interactions.

Unfolding different meanings in various directions, embracing the dynamics of participatory creation and behavior, Why Can't We Live Together? is an art piece that explores a range of possible living forms. Matteo & Claudio create a space of resistance, offering a possibility for naked relationships, sincere and unspoken conversations. It is the weft of a common and primordial politics of conviviality.