MATTEO PENZA (IT, 1993)
Residency period: October 2026
Matteo Penza is an Italian artist who lives and works in Marseille. After earning his degree in architecture from the University of Naples in 2016, he continued his studies at the Marseille School of Fine Arts, where he earned a master’s degree in design. As the recipient of the 2023 Agora Research Grant in Design for his project Cocagne, he has developed a practice that examines the role of the designer in a world facing ecological and social crises. Through research, objects, narratives, and collective initiatives, he explores design as a tool for fostering connections, prioritizing interdisciplinary collaborations and forms of conviviality that can give rise to new imaginaries and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Matteo Penza will be at La Becque throughout October as part of a residency in partnership with Plateforme 10.
During his residency, Matteo will work on the research and fiction project T0RUL4G4TE, developed in collaboration with Antoine Vernouillet and Louis Fischer. The project explores the links between the commercial distribution of six fortified wines, orchestrated by English merchants between the 12th and 19th centuries, and the emergence of capitalism. Blending historical inquiry with speculative narrative, T0RUL4G4TE draws on the tropes of conspiracy theory to examine the mechanisms by which goods, narratives, and ideologies circulate. By deliberately combining disparate concepts, the project offers a critical and offbeat interpretation of economic history and its contemporary imaginaries.