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Matteo Mastrandrea

Matteo Mastrandrea

Matteo Mastrandrea is an architect, set designer, and researcher. He is Design Director of Es Devlin Studio and a PhD candidate at Cambridge University.

Matteo Mastrandrea studied architecture at Cambridge University and the RCA. He now works as a set designer.

His experience is interdisciplinary – with work that crosses the worlds of art, opera, music, film and technology – and covers a range of scales, from sculptures that address a single viewer to live events that address a whole nation/planet.

Matteo’s PhD draws from his work in practice, exploring – through the lens of 20th century Hollywood cinema – the critical role sets play in establishing new hierarchies between subjects/objects/things/environments.

His writing has been printed in publications produced by Tate, RIBA, e-flux, Pitzhanger Gallery, and Arcadia Missa.

Since 2016, Matteo has taught Architectural Design Studio 4 (ADS4) at the RCA, alongside Tom Greenall and Nicola Koller.

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Matteo’s research is motivated by a long-running interest in performance and the role space plays in determining narrative modes/registers, as well as a belief that an abiding antitheatricalism in contemporary theory and debate has ensured that these spatial practices – practices which are relevant in a world of profound ecological collapse – are consistently ignored or overlooked (in architecture and elsewhere).

His thesis examines the ways in which a set of staging practices linked with the theatre and situational dramaturgy have (both historically and contemporarily) infiltrated other creative domains (particularly film). These practices lend sets/scenography a capacity to render objects other than they are, inviting new, more radical relations between “subjects” and things. Relations which are often profoundly ecological.

Matteo has worked as a scenographer for almost 10 years on a variety of building, performance and moving image projects, collaborating primarily with acclaimed artist Es Devlin.

His spatial practice aims to confront urgent social and political questions by engaging with materials, landscapes, history, culture and the climate through the prism of theatrical performance.

Selected recent credits include: Echo (Cirque du Soleil, 2023), The Weeknd (Tour, 2023), Come Home Again (Tate Modern, 2022), A Number (Old Vic, 2022), Superbowl LVI Halftime Show (Sofi Stadium LA, 2022), The Lehman Trilogy (National Theatre, ongoing), Conference of the Trees (COP26, 2021), Blueskywhite (180 Strand, 2021), I Saw the World End (IWM/Piccadilly Circus, 2021), Five Echoes (Art Basel, Miami, 2021), Your Voices (Lincoln Center, New York, 2021), British EXPO Pavilion (Dubai, 2021), Unknown Soldier (Royal Opera House, 2018), The Weeknd (Coachella, 2018).

Selected Publications

Mastrandrea, M. (2023). Fake Plastic Trees. E-flux Architecture.

Mastrandrea, M. (2022). Home. In: E. Devlin, Come Home Again (Tate) pp. 11-13.

Mastrandrea, M., Greenall, T. and Koller, N. (2022). Plausible Impossibilities. In: G. Barton ed., Experimental Realism: (Design) Fictions and Futures. London: RIBA Publishing, pp. 12-21.

Mastrandrea, M. (2019) Unthought Thoughts. In E. Devlin, Memory Palace (Pitzhanger) pp. 151-153

Future Now: 100 Contemporary Artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize, 2018. (Contributed essay)

Mastrandrea, M. (2017). In Defence of (an-)Arkhē. E-flux Architecture.