Shelter Chapter 1 is a performance by the duo Primitive Art—curated by Davide Giannella—encompassing different forms of performative expression, sound research, visual arts within a single experience shared with the audience.

Specifically contextualized for the MACRO, it unfolds inside a twelve square meter metal structure with an essential, almost childlike design, simultaneously a house suspended in the air through mechanical elevators and a permeable skeleton for the viewer’s gaze. A sound system in 7.1 surround and lights envelop the structure and design the space, guiding the public in an fluid, circular motion. They are invited to distribute themselves across the space and around the duo, as if in an arena. The usual, frontal relationship between spectator and performer is at once cancelled and overcome, making the experience both individual and collective.

This creates a living environment with its usual contradictions and conflicts, and a scenario which aims to address key issues for the duo: isolation as refuge and form of escapism; the unresolved desire; homesickness; the sense of an elsewhere that is impossible to define or forget; the feeling of a danger to be deciphered and localized. 

The spatialization of the sound is by Lorenzo Dal Ri, the stage design is by Matteo Petrucci.

Primitive Art is an experimental music band formed in Milan in 2011 from the collaboration between Matteo Pit and Jim C. Nedd. Primitive Art debuted with the album Problems (2013), in which they presented for the first time a mixture of musical elements that places them outside of genres. A sound where hypnotic rhythms, melancholy melodies, verses and words collide with each other, creating strange soundscapes.