Matteo Rubbi was born not far from Bergamo in 1980. He studied industrial chemistry at high school, loved it, but was, by his own account, a mess in the lab. He studied art instead, graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 2005. Since then he has been exploring ideas and inventing projects with other people: setting up a Solar System with people orbiting themselves, transforming museums and schools into shipyards to rebuild old vessels in 1:1 scale with waste material.
In 2007 he co-founded Cherimus with visual artists Emiliana Sabiu and Marco Colombaioni, an art association based in Sulcis, Sardinia, that experiments with alternative ways of working on the relationship between art and community. The project he is most proud of is Carnival! Nairobi (2018), in which he and artists from Italy and Kenya worked with Kenyan street educators and communities of children living on the streets to invent an entire carnival based on the participants' own dreams and ideas. The parade through the streets of Nairobi was, in his words, a real landmark in his artistic practice.
He is currently developing a residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in California and preparing for the Camargo Foundation in Marseille, where he and his partner, writer Zeyn Joukhadar, will research the history and traditions surrounding the constellations of Mediterranean peoples throughout the centuries, building what they hope will become a real Atlas of the Night Sky.
