Interview with Matteo Antoniazzi by Bettina Pelz.
Published on 27 JUN 2025.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and tell us something about your artistic background?
My name is Matteo Antoniazzi, and I am an Italian visual artist. I think of what I do as tinkering with image and space that has to do with overlapping, interlocking, and the intrusion of one body into another.
How did you get involved in the FOOTNOTES project and what attracted you to take part?
I am a student at HfK and participate in the EXHIBIT group, so I am part of the lot that conceived FOOTNOTES. Regarding the idea of footnotes, and what attracted me to it in this context, I have recently been more and more interested in focusing on how small narratives and intrusions can become a subtle but persistent source of disturbance, an intimate form of disorder that creeps in gently, uninvited.
What is your contribution to FOOTNOTES?
“Il Rantolo,” a short looping CG video that features a mouse gasping for breath in an infinite limbo. I was inspired by the mouse figure found in the Bremen Cathedral, in a corner, petrified and forlorn, a fifth animal too many that does not enjoy the fame of the musicians. I immediately found this image terribly pitiful, so I wanted to immortalize it in this digital loop that always oscillates between excess and absence, between the embalming resulting from heavy rendering processes and the faint emptiness of computer graphics.
How did you approach the topic of “FOOTNOTES” and how does your work relate to it?
I must say that the location and space of the exhibition were a particular challenge to me, as I prefer to have the utmost control over how, why, and where I show my works. The initial idea was to adapt a previous body of work of mine to the venue, but I soon realized that that wouldn’t be possible; the works would have been weakened by the open location and by the giant screen. So, I decided to see what was around the square, and I fell in love with the Cathedral mouse. The work was constructed in a very spontaneous way, and, something that has never happened to me, it has no major conceptual structures. It is almost on the edge of being an illustration, a decoration, and because of that, it plays with the shimmering seduction of the decorative and of the digital, and the violence of the empty figures that inhabit it. So I took this animal too much, a footnote, precisely, and translated it into this world that is there, but not completely, where there is everything, but something is always missing.