Michela de Mattei draws upon occluded narratives to explore the complexities of authority. In particular, Michela draws connections between the natural world and our relations to it.

Selected works

My work deals with the shift between sculpture and drawing, reflecting about representation and its hitch in reality. I try and ponder the mass of things I face, all of the little events and the loss of contact with reality. Then I start again.
—Michela de Mattei

Exhibitions and series

Until lions have their historians, hunters will always be the heroes
2018 — date

Taking its name from the Africa proverb, Until lions have their historians, hunters will always be the heroes is a long-term project that aims to collect histories about human animal conflicts; specifically, moments of animal resistance to human control. An open archive, that operates across multiple creative outlets, the project asks “what does it mean to have agency?” and “who is able of making and telling their own history?” By questioning the idea of a historical canon, the project foregrounds untold stories, forgotten episodes and ultimately a non-human perspective; recognising the power and agency animals have in the making of their own histories.

Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL. 1 is an artist’s book and the first output of Until lions have their historians, hunters will always be the heroes, a long-term project by Michela de Mattei that will progressively expand through a series of releases across different media aiming to trace, weave, reimagine and circulate stories of animal resistance to human control and domination. The first volume records a series of neglected episodes of revolt and attack by animals against humans, combining them with other sources and a selection of texts by Val Plumwood, Jason Hribal along with a conversation with Filipa Ramos.

published by Aniene (Italy)
208 pages
23,5 × 32,5 cm
500 copies
ISBN 978-88-940857-8-5

available here 

Estée Lauder
series, 2015 — date

Estée Lauder is a Gloucester-based, Indian-born Myna bird, with whom Michela has been in conversation via Skype since September 2015. This long-term relationship has led to the creation of a number of works, including video pieces, drawings, performances, and most recently, a Virtual Reality experience. Adopting the aesthetics of online tutorials, throughout the series Michela attempts to  find a shared language through which to reflect on possible connections between humans and animals.

“Michela De Mattei’s new series of films emerge as a privileged terrain for exploring humans-animal behaviours and consciousness, providing, in this way, the conditions for diverse disciplines to engage with the themes of interspecies communication and relationships […] De Mattei (b.1984, Rome) is definitely able to create an unexpected new space, both playful and telling, in the gaps between fiction and reality, looping together human, animal and technological.”
—Giulia Ponzano

Estée Lauder – Expanded/Extended, 2022

Questioning the extent that new technologies can intervene in interspecies relationships, and whether they can actually break the conditions of captivity as well as animal solitude, this Virtual Reality (VR) experience expands the personal relationship Michela has developed with Estée Lauder, allowing others to enter into this animate dialogue.

Access the VR experience here

Estée Lauder – Hypnosis session, 2018

Commissioned by Serpentine Galleries (London, UK) as part of the Symposium The shape of a circle in the mind of a fish, in this video Michela uses hypnosis techniques to deepen the level of communication between herself and Estée Lauder, questioning the limits of and indeed the conditions of captivity.

Estée Lauder – The Fear of Mistakes, 2016

Overlaying video footage of a life model posing in the nude for a life drawing class, and the audio from a tutorial on public speaking, The Fear of Mistakes alludes to the ways in which humans train themselves to perform in different social surroundings.

Estée Lauder – Adapting, 2016

Adapting spotlights a dancer performing for Estée Lauder. As with The Fear of Mistakes, the video makes connections between human acts of coercion and those used to make animals perform in a similar manner.

Estée Lauder – How to speak like president, 2015

weaving together narratives from traditional online English lessons, How to speak like president(subita) subtly references processes of delusion at the heart of self-improvement strategies; those co-opted by Michela throughout this series of works.

Aquaria – Or the illusion of a boxed sea
MAAT Museum, Lisbon, 2021

Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea is an exhibition that looks at how the ocean has washed up inside our cities, homes and cultural institutions. Invented in the Victorian age, the aquarium as object embodies the nature/culture divide and continues to constitute an ocean diorama, a self-contained world and a techno-natural assemblage, home to a living collection mirroring our own personal yet fictional marine world. In this way, as an exhibition, Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea, questions how we have interiorised the notion of an ocean kingdom.
(further information about Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea)

The World Part I: MIRAGE
Alserkal Art Foundation, Dubai, 2019

In The World Part I: MIRAGE we witness the subaquatic melting of a 250kg ice-carved camel sculpture. Like an underwater mirage, or hallucination, here the camel disintegrates into its watery surround through a game of optical refractions, changing the state of the liquid matter in the process.

Filmed off the coast of Fujairah (United Arab Emirates), the video reflects on the relationship between luxury and wonder. That is, by shifting perspective and immersing a viewer underwater, the video questions the conventional frontal frame of natural spectacles, blurring the distinction between terrestrial and aquatic, artificial and natural, fiction and reality.

Blushing
Belmacz, London, 2019

“For her first solo exhibition at Belmacz, London-based Italian artist Michela de Mattei explores the immediate human reaction provoked by embarrassment through a new video work and a body of thermochromic paintings. To observe the universal yet little understood phenomenon of blushing, de Mattei engaged with existing literature and also conducted a project of first-hand evidence gathering through conversations, interactions and observation sessions.”
—Lavinia Filippi

Sinfonia per orci
permanent installation at Terme di Vulci, 2021

Sinfonia per Orci is a sound installation composed by 41 terracotta jars of different sizes. They stand together as a living organism with multiple mouths echoing the sound piece through 10 audio channels. Bringing together sounds of nature, high frequencies, reverberations of materials and mechanical sounds, the composition resonates through the vessels following different trajectories in space.

Graft 8, Round Around
2015

“During the residency of Apulia Land Art Festival in the area of ostuni’s vegetable gardens, Michela de Mattei conceived a double intervention: according to her specific interest for the structure of elements, the artist dwelt on the inner shape of the tree trunks and their progressive circular growth, ring after ring. The first work is a video showing the hypnotic movement of a hula hoop around the stem of an almond tree; while the second installation is a graft of a wooden ring into the trunk of a fig tree, which stands along the path of the gardens. In both cases, de Mattei suggests a correspondence between the circular motion of the hoop and the only movement allowed to a plant: the loop; imagining in the video an incessant movement of the hula hoop around the tree, artifice that finds its crystallization in the graft intervention.”
—Saverio Verini

Vogliatemi perdonare per quel poco di disturbo che reco
Ex Elettrofonica, Roma, 2014

The project was conceived for the space of Galleria Ex Elettrofonica, (Rome, Italy) as a double intervention: a site-specific installation of glass sculptures and a streaming video showing in real time the life of 3 cheetahs inside Parco Natura Viva in Verona.

The installation combines glass panels and objects, playing with the transparency of the material and layering the space as a painter would do to veil a canvas. The live video-streaming was projected on the wall during the 3 months of the exhibition as a landscape-painting setting down every day. The streaming shows a small portion of the field inhabited by the 3 cheetahs and the animals as performers eventually appear on stage. The transparent encumbrances of the sculptures and the live streaming are imagined as two ways out of the gallery space.

Insist and disert
2014

Peinture de Paysage

Innesto #6
2013

“ri-orientamento is a product of a historical study of the Santa rita hall: the former church that was founded in 1653 in the vicinity of Aracoeli was removed in 1928 to be then rebuilt in 1937- 40 in the position where it stands today. During the reconstruction, some references from the original were lost, including the spatial orientation. Michela de Mattei traces the profile of the interior of the hall, studying its supporting elements and reconstructs them by rotating the perimeter, not in order to restore its initial design, but to investigate the relationship that binds man to space. The artist reinterprets the architecture through a subtle interplay of materials such as iron and marble that emerge as graphic signs allowing the viewer to trace, with transparency, the original reference. The exhibition consists of an environmental sculpture and a video in which the architectural profiles of the hall become tools for understanding the landscape, incorporating it and at the same time outlining its boundaries.”
—Daniela Cotimbo

Nature Morte
2012

The Nature Morte series explores the common genre of still life by reverting the natural dried textures of the plants into classic compositions. The prickly pear fibers (usually a water supplier for the plant) are here transformed through an almost architectural process into empty containers, juxtaposed one next to the other and then spray painted. Inspired by Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, the sculptures reshape objects collected from various places by the artist and reenact them into personal domestic representations.

Untitled (Postmodernism)
2010

Collected from junk metal dealers, the 160 water pipes that make up the installation Untitled (Postmodernism) are arranged chromatically, so as to evoke postmodernist feelings.

Artist biography