Projects — Matteo Mandelli (YOU)

01 The Contact 2022 – Ongoing The Contact is the project that marks a turning point in Matteo Mandelli's artistic research. Born from a period of deep reflection on our relationship with digital devices, the series begins with a simple yet radical gesture: cutting an LCD screen. What initially appears as an act of destruction becomes an act of revelation. Behind the surface of the display emerges an unexpected world of moving crystals, light and unpredictable forms, turning each screen into a unique and living artwork. For Mandelli, the screen is no longer a device but a threshold. By physically crossing it, the work questions what lies beyond the interfaces that increasingly mediate our lives. Every screen reacts differently, making experimentation and direct dialogue with the material an essential part of the art View project →

02 Machina Sacra 2026 – Ongoing Machina Sacra is a participatory performance and installation that reinterprets one of Southern Italy's oldest collective rituals through the visual language of contemporary technology. A community procession carries a large luminous screen instead of a religious statue. Participants walk holding illuminated smartphones mounted on wooden staffs, while a liturgy generated in dialogue with artificial intelligence unfolds through their devices. At the beginning of the action, the screen is physically cut with a grinder, transforming the display into a symbolic threshold where light emerges through fracture rather than representation. The work does not parody religious tradition. Instead, it adopts its symbolic structure to investigate the shifting forms of belief, trust and collective parti View project →

03 Cyber Carpet 2024 – Ongoing Cyber Carpet originates from the encounter between two worlds that, despite belonging to distant eras, share the same visual and symbolic language: the Persian carpet and the electronic circuit. For Matteo Mandelli, both are systems of connection. The carpet weaves together stories, memories and generations; the circuit connects information, energy and digital communication. Their structures unexpectedly resemble one another, revealing a common visual grammar based on networks, paths and relationships. Growing up surrounded by Persian carpets in his family's collection, Mandelli transformed a familiar childhood image into a contemporary visual language. The project also evolves directly from The Contact, where discarded electronic circuits become the starting point for a new act of creat View project →

04 Fioriture Sintetiche A project by Sintetica Collective (Matteo Mandelli & Luca Baldocchi). 2024 – 2026 Synthetic Blooms was born from a simple gesture: placing digital screens inside a garden to observe how technology could coexist with nature. Instead of replacing the natural world, the project creates a dialogue between organic life and digital creation, imagining a new ecosystem where both can exist together. Developed by Sintetica Collective, founded by Matteo Mandelli and Luca Baldocchi, the series transforms reclaimed flower pots into living sculptures. Inside each vessel, a digital screen displays flowers generated through artificial intelligence, created from photographs of real flowers collected over time. Rather than simulating nature, AI becomes a tool to explore transformation, memory and permanence. The project reflects on one of the defining questions of our time: what happe View project →

05 Equilibri Precari 2025 – Ongoing Equilibri Precari explores one of the most familiar objects of everyday life: the supermarket trolley. Originally designed to carry goods, it is transformed into the base of monumental vertical sculptures made from accumulations of ordinary objects. Books, televisions, tyres, fire extinguishers, sports equipment and other consumer products are stacked into precarious compositions that appear simultaneously stable and on the verge of collapse. This tension becomes the central metaphor of the project: the more we accumulate, the more fragile the balance becomes. Each sculpture investigates a different aspect of contemporary consumption. The chosen objects are never random; they represent habits, obsessions, desires and collective behaviours that define modern life. The trolley loses its or View project →

06 ItaGLIA 2018 – Ongoing TAGLIA is a sculptural series inspired by one of the most familiar scenes in Italian cities: bicycles left resting on bricks after their wheels have been stolen. Matteo Mandelli transforms this everyday image into a symbolic language. Bicycles, unicycles and tricycles are finished in gold, celebrating the extraordinary cultural, artistic and historical richness of Italy. Yet their wheels—the very elements that allow movement—are removed and replaced with ordinary bricks. This simple substitution changes the meaning of the object entirely. What should represent freedom, progress and movement becomes immobile. The work reflects on a country capable of extraordinary beauty while often limiting its own potential through behaviours, habits and contradictions generated from within. The title View project →

07 Cryptotramp 2019 – Paused Cryptotramp is a performative investigation into visibility, empathy and the contradictions of the digital economy. During the rise of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Matteo Mandelli transformed himself into a homeless person in cities across Europe. Instead of asking passers-by for money, he asked exclusively for cryptocurrency. This small but unexpected change interrupted people's automatic behaviour, forcing them to stop, observe and question what they were seeing. The project is not about cryptocurrency itself. It is about perception. By replacing a familiar request with an unfamiliar one, Cryptotramp reveals how easily people overlook marginality until something disrupts their expectations. The work becomes a reflection on invisibility, technological progress and the fragile relationship View project →

08 From the Sea to the Market 2020 - Ongoing From the Sea to the Market is an environmental art project that transforms marine plastic waste into a powerful reflection on consumption, pollution and collective responsibility. The project began with a public installation along Milan's Navigli, where plastic recovered from the sea was presented as if it were the day's catch in a traditional fish market. This first intervention introduced the central idea: bringing back to people what is usually hidden beneath the surface of the ocean. The project later evolved on the Indonesian island of Lombok with the opening of a temporary restaurant built entirely around the same concept. For two months, visitors entered a symbolic space where the relationship between food, consumption and plastic pollution became impossible to ignore. More than View project →

09 Domestic League 2026 Domestic League is an interactive installation in which the structure of football — field, teams, goals and rules — is displaced into the domestic environment and entrusted to autonomous machines. The field becomes a Persian carpet. The players are robotic vacuum cleaners, visually transformed into opposing teams. Devices originally designed for cleaning and repetition are reassigned to competition, moving without strategy or awareness. The match emerges through collisions, trajectories and chance. Each encounter follows one simple rule: first goal wins. The artist defines the system but cannot control its outcome. What appears to be strategy is often randomness interpreted by the spectator, revealing our instinct to project intention, rivalry and narrative onto autonomous behavior. The View project →