Matteo Bozzi - Why Can't We Live Together?

Installation shot - 'Untitled (Red walls)', 2024 (wooden frame, cardboard, acrylic, resin)

Why Can’t We Live Together? is a project by Matteo Bozzi and Claudio La Mattina, exploring conviviality as a tool to reimagine spatial narratives. Working across sculpture, film, and performance, the project interrogates how architecture and spatial environments can frame, and even shape, the social and emotional dynamics that define human interaction.

Presented by Refusés, their debut solo exhibition in London draws together two years of research into the intersections of social, political, and artistic relationships. The show is presented as an immersive sequence, unfolding through layered media—photography, sculpture, film, and sound. By examining how bodies move through and alter architectural space, Matteo and Claudio invite viewers to experience the instability and potential of human relationships through a spatial, tactile lens

Installation shot - 'Untitled (Blue cones)', 2024 (cardboard, acrylic, resin)

The exhibition begins with the duo’s exploration of performative gestures, captured in photographs that show bodies interacting with performative sculptures. From here, viewers transition to a second room presenting two sculptural installations, each designed as thresholds that embody the porosity central to the duo’s inquiry. These installations invite viewers to consider how boundaries are simultaneously enforced and dissolved, how space becomes both a point of entry and a barrier.

The final room centres around a life-sized screen showcasing the project’s cinematic component—a short film that reframes the sculptural and spatial ideas into a narrative form. Here, unclad figures navigate spaces of tension and intimacy, exploring vulnerability and connection through subtle gestures and physical encounters. This film is less a conclusion than a continuation, a descent into the themes of interaction and reciprocity that the artists interrogate.

The exhibition resists a linear narrative, instead layering sensory experiences that invite visitors to contemplate the precarious balance of conviviality—how our interactions construct and dissolve spaces of belonging. By reframing conviviality as an act of artistic resistance, Matteo and Claudio invite us to consider how new relational forms can emerge from openness and permeability, suggesting alternative modes of collective existence.