Michela de Mattei works across different formats and media, often developing fictional scenarios and unusual ecosystems in which animal-human affairs are hijacked by technologies. In doing so, her works question standards of authority and control, speaking to issues of animal agency and the changing dynamics of communication systems.

select exhibition history and series

Flash_Looking 
Belmacz, London (UK) 2024

The silver foil ‘scratch cards’ which constitute Michela de Mattei’s HANDSIGHTINGS series look like flat sheets of trembling steel. Beneath these surfaces however lie grainy photographic stills, images which document the existence of the said to be extinct Tasmanian tiger (aka the Thylacine). These frozen moments each come from a 19’29’’ video, assembled and edited by Michela from footage circulating amongst an online network of ‘Thylacine believers’. Echoing the ‘quest’ undertaken by this network, Michela occludes each of her stills behind a screen of grey, re-translating these digital records into chance encounters. Following her own quest-like process, Michela scratches into her print’s silvered surfaces so as to slightly reveal their haunting presences. Building on her investigation into human inabilities to cope with extinction and loss, and the mechanisms we use to overcome these feelings, the formalities of Michela’s prints give an image to humanly forms of longing. Indeed, to the community of believers collectively seeking encounters with these ‘living ghosts’, aspiring to prove their existence. Flash-looking, these works not only image the imperilled Thylacine but pointedly suggest how acts of seeing are never neutral.

Ahahaha…

MACRO Museum, Rome (Italy) 2024

Ahahaha… alludes to Gino De Dominicis’s continuous laughter and makes an interspecies leap by presenting an animal and subterranean perspective, through a sound work that reproduces the vocalizations–commonly referred to as ‘rat laughter’–emitted by non-human animals during their play activities.

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

Acquavideo, 2020

The video-installation, Acquavideo, takes as a starting point a water leakage that occurred at the Dubai Aquarium inside the Dubai Mall in 2010. Juxtaposing the Internet footage of the recordings of the incident with the artist’s recent first hand recordings inside the Dubai Aquarium, the video wants to question the idea of aquarium both as a window into an underwater world, a display of marvels, as well as an artificial and problematic reproduction holding wonder and anxiety tightly together.
(further information about the project can be found here)

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.

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

part of the series: 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.

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

UNTIL LIONS HAVE THEIR HISTORIANS HUNTERS WILL ALWAYS BE THE HEROES is 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.

part of the series: 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.

part of the series: 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.

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

part of the series: 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.

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.

Peinture de Paysage
2014

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.

publications

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 

Artist biography

Education. Michela de Mattei (b.1984, Rome, Italy) studied Philosophy at Universita di Roma la Sapienza.

Select exhibitions. Flash_Looking, Belmacz, London, UK (2024); RETROFUTURE, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO), Rome (2024); Dive-In, Porto Design Biennale, Porto (2023); SOTTOPALCO, Campo Teatrale, Milan (2023);  Estée Lauder, Expanded/Extended,  MAXXI L’Aquila, Rome, and IL MAXXIVERSO, online (2022); .The animated cloister – space is just noise, Museum of Rome in Trastevere, Italy (2022); Post-Turismo (curated by Giuliana Benassi), Post ex, Rome, Italy (2022);  Aquaria -The illusion of a boxed sea, curated by Angela Rui, MAAT museum, Lisbon (2021); Hypermaremma, Terme di Vulci (2021); Nuovo Cinema Galleria, Galeria Vera Cortez, Lisbon (2020); Hypermaremma ( Chapter II ), Antica Città Di Cosa, Italy (2019); Blushing, Belmacz, London (2019); Estée Lauder series (curated by Lavinia Filippi), Italian Cultural Institute, London (2018); The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Part 1: Language (curated by Filipa Ramos and Lucia Pietroiusti), Serpentines Galleries / ZSL London Zoo (2018); Allevamento di Tiranni, Una Vetrina, Rome (2017); Bodikon, Belmacz, London (2017); There is no place like home 4°, Riverside dock, Rome; InterKontinental, Belmacz, London (2016); La Pelle, Project by FONDACO, Officina, Brussels (2016); Rétrospective I: Fail Compilation, Détail, Paris (2016); Feets, Don’t Fail Me Now, Belmacz, London (2015); Vogliatemi perdonare quel poco di disturbo che reco, Ex Elettrofonica, Rome (2014); Innesto #6, Orientamento | Michela de Mattei, Sala Santa Rita, Rome (2013).

Awards and residencies. In 2019 Michela was in residence at the Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai.

Michela lives and works in Milan.