As French biologist and Nobel Prize winner François Jacob writes, ‘Natural selection operates not as an engineer but as a ‘bricoleur’, who does not know exactly what he will produce, but who recovers everything he finds around him, the strangest and most diverse things, pieces of string or wood, old cardboard boxes that could possibly provide him with material: in short, a “bricoleur” who uses everything at hand to make something useful.

Matarazzo started from these considerations, together with a parallel drawn in Levy-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage , which compares the artist to a bricoleur, to construct some parts of the film and, above all, to articulate this installation created specifically for the 30th edition of the Linea d’Ombra Festival.

The protagonist (Martha Festa) engages in a game with her animalistic double, then crosses the rooms of a doll’s house built in the 1920s by a wealthy New York lady, Carrie Stettheimer. The small house was furnished with miniature works by various artists (including Marcel Duchamp).

At the heart of the work is an endless game of chess – also alluded to by the arrangement of six 28″ monitors on the backlit floor – which sapiens have been playing for millions of years. The journey inside this interior symbolises the habitat that sapiens have built for themselves, move by move, over time. An environment that is only apparently protective and reassuring, since it can be disrupted by conflicts, violence or natural disasters.

Planet Earth is a microcosm when compared to the universe in which we are immersed, prisoners of a lost original harmony that we are no longer able to restore.