Matteo Bozzi - Why Can't We Live Together?

Why Can’t We Live Together? is a collaborative project by Matteo Bozzi and Claudio La Mattina, exploring conviviality as a tool to reimagine spatial narratives. Through sculpture, film, and performance, the project examines how architectural space intertwines with relational and emotional dynamics. It questions how environments both shape and are shaped by specific human rituals, situating the body as both subject and object in exploring the social and political intricacies embedded in human relationships.

Initiated in 2022 in Naples, the project draws on the city’s “porosity,” a concept articulated by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis to describe Naples’ tendency to blur the lines between public and private realms, where the visible and invisible interlace. This porous quality became central to Matteo and Claudio’s work, illustrating what unfolds when rigid separations between bodies, spaces, and politics begin to erode.

Performance rehearsals, L'Asilo, 2023

The project’s core took form in a residency at L’Asilo, a self-managed cultural space within the network of Neapolitan Commons. During a two-month residency, Matteo and Claudio led a participatory laboratory, engaging local communities in reimagining spatial and social relations. Drawing on the Neapolitan Smorfia, a traditional dream-interpretation guide, they crafted a sculptural language of sixteen cardboard structures hovering between architecture and costume. These ambiguous forms became relational tools, inviting participants to reimagine familiar social dynamics, challenging accepted norms of spatial interaction.

Live Performance at L'Asilo, July 2023

Matteo and Claudio expanded Why Can’t We Live Together? into a short film, collaborating with filmmaker Simone Bozzelli and choreographer Max Cookward. They translated their sculptural practice into a cinematic language, threading visual metaphors through the narrative to evoke the complexity of coexistence. The film meditates on the body’s fragility, placing unclad figures in spaces where new modes of interaction unfold. Gestures become sites of negotiation—both tender and fraught—as bodies move through uncertain spaces, seeking connection.

Why Can’t We Live Together? invites reflection on the ethics of conviviality, holding the question open. Its tension lies in the unresolved, pointing to possibilities for new forms of solidarity. By creating spaces that resist definition, Matteo and Claudio gesture toward the possibility of new modes of relationship, where conviviality is as fragile as it is resilient.