“There is nothing in the universe that is not natural. Cities and their landscapes are natural, as are apartments, deserts, forests, plains, and seas. (…) By creating cities, by inventing concrete, asphalt and glass, men have invented a new jungle of which they are not yet the inhabitants.” Jean-Marie Le Clezio

The Origins of Table Manners, which in the title of the exhibition explicitly cites the studies of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, presents itself as a large installation that unfolds across the various exhibition spaces of the apartment and is composed of sculptural ceramic elements, paintings, embroidery, and a video documenting a performance. These artifices all work together to bring the spectators to the center of a sumptuous cannibalistic banquet, watched over by two beaked Arcimboldo-style allegories of ‘Abundance’ and ‘Vanity’.

At the center of the table, the body of the artist is dismembered, becoming food. It makes itself beautiful to seduce us, like an aphrodisiac food, confounding us among its decorations and garnishes, disguises and beauty treatments.

The fullness of the dining room is contrasted with a more empty and intimate space. Here, one is invited to spy into the dimness of a bedroom, inhabited by two enigmatic figures wearing helmets and slippers, who are in turn watching an advertisement about body care, which makes explicit the discourse on consumerism, capitalism, and commodities.

In recreating the interior of a bourgeois apartment, Maggini generates a language made up of myths, ways of dining, and recipes for cooking food. Such customs, in fact, say much more: although they may seem casual, they are the means through which a society unconsciously translates its mental structure or even reveals, always without knowing it, its contradictions.