An elderly mother, with a past as a performance artist, pretends to be dead in order to get a little attention from her three children, who are always busy, disinterested, alienated, aggressive and absent. Just like certain animals, who use this technique to escape from predators, Maria Grazia uses thanatosis; faking death. Her gesture could be seen as a warning, a reprimand, a sign, a request or a simple performance... Then there is Simona, her obstetrician daughter and clumsy environmentalist, crushed by worry for the younger generations ; Riccardo, her primary-school-teacher son, a truly good man, who comes across a vague and never-published text from On the origin of species, cited by Borges in an interview with Bioy Casares; and lastly Gioia, a daughter in symbiosis with her mother and herself an artist, who studies Amazonian perspectivism and the theory of interspecies, feeling herself to be closer to the plant world than the animal kingdom.
Darwin inconsolabile is not only an ironic and profound story on human relationships, but also “a metaphor for the situation that characterises our planet – explains Lucia Calamaro –. Maria Grazia is a kind of Earth Mother, seeking in any way possible to warn us of the problems that we humans are causing through our sinecure; the Earth is telling us ‘I’m dying’, so that we can change things. It is like a mother who is uncared for and who, I imagine, stages a terminal illness in order to alert us; a cry for help”.