MattiaStompo

In partnership with adidas TERREX, this feature documentary follows ultra-runner Deo Kato’s remarkable journey from Cape Town to London and quest for change. The film follows the Ugandan-born ultra-runner’s 13,500km journey, using endurance as a way to explore migration, identity, belonging and what it really means to feel at home.

Producing a film of this scale meant operating without a traditional production structure. Deo was largely alone on the road for 17 months, which meant the documentary depended on a continuous, uncontrolled stream of self-captured footage — shot across wildly varying conditions, devices, and lighting environments, often in conflict zones or during physical extremes. My role was to build a coherent production pipeline around footage I had no control over at the source: establishing workflows for ingesting and logging material as it arrived in real time, coordinating with director Phil Young on narrative priorities, and ensuring that the post-production team always had what they needed.

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Yamaha Music commissioned Brody Associates to develop an apparel range exploring the t-shirt as a form of musical expression. The result was a generative design system built entirely from scratch: custom software using physics simulation to model the forces of sound waves on particles, and radial rendering tools translating different instrumental timbres into graphic form — all converging to reconstruct the Yamaha logo as a visual cacophony.

My role was to manage the relationship between the studio’s creative ambition and the expectations of a global client. The core challenge: translating a highly experimental, technology-led process into something a brand could own, approve, and manufacture — building approval frameworks around inherent unpredictability, and structuring feedback loops carefully enough that Yamaha felt confident without constraining the designer. Getting a global Japanese brand to sign off on something described as “a harmonious cacophony” required trust built incrementally, deliverable by deliverable.

Project out in 2027

Nikon has run its international photo contest since 1969 — one of the most storied competitions in photography. For the 2024–25 edition, the contest expanded to place film categories at the forefront for the first time in its history, requiring a full brand evolution: new identity, motion system, digital toolkit, and physical awards. The work was led by Neville Brody.

Project managing this partnership meant navigating one of the more structurally complex client relationships I’ve encountered. Nikon’s decision-making was based in Japan, with key contacts who communicated primarily in Japanese — walls that were not just linguistic, but cultural. The project also carried enormous legacy weight: suggesting changes to an identity that has existed for over 50 years required evidence-based rationale that goes beyond aesthetic preference. Every design decision had to be positioned as a natural extension of the contest’s history, not a departure from it.

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When Sandwich Magazine — the independent food culture publication published by TCO London — launched its Chef’s Special edition guest-edited by Gordon Ramsay, the moment called for an event that matched the issue’s energy: irreverent, food-obsessed, and properly star-studded. The launch was held at Ramsay’s Pizza East restaurant, where he unveiled his own Idiot Sandwich to a packed house of London’s culinary and media world.

Running this event meant working simultaneously across worlds that don’t always speak the same language: a high-profile celebrity and his team, an independent magazine with a strong editorial identity, a restaurant venue, a broadcast-facing PR campaign, and a guest list ranging from food critics to social media creators. My job was to make sure that the magazine’s voice stayed central — that the event felt like a Sandwich party that happened to feature Gordon Ramsay, not the other way around.

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Mosaico is a multi-day music and culture festival held in Piazza Armerina, a hilltop baroque town in central Sicily. As Head of Production, I oversee the full operational delivery across four days: 25+ performances spanning live acts and DJ sets, multiple stages, and around 4,000 attendees. What makes Mosaico genuinely hard is the context: Piazza Armerina is (or was) not a festival city.

Everything — staging, power, sound, artist logistics, hospitality, security — is sourced and built fresh each year, in a town of 18,000 people in rural Sicily. Programming 25+ acts across genres and scales means the production brief shifts radically between performances. Scheduling has to account for build times, artist availability, audience flow — and the rhythms of a town that has its own daily life running alongside the festival. The town and the festival have to coexist, which means every decision has a neighbour attached to it.

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2LAB is a cultural centre dedicated to contemporary photography, founded in Catania in 2014 together with my father. In a region with no established infrastructure for this kind of work, we built a permanent space for exhibitions, workshops, screenings, masterclasses, and fine art print services — hosting photographers including Colin Pantall, Luis Cobelo, and Arianna Arcara, and operating as a reference fine art printing point for artists and festivals across Sicily and beyond.

There is no template for running an independent contemporary photography centre in the south of Italy. Every programme is built without the institutional funding or established audiences that comparable spaces in Milan or Rome take for granted. Over a decade, 2LAB has grown into something genuinely rare in Sicily: a place where artists can exhibit, learn, print, and find professional support that usually only exists in larger cultural capitals. I think that didn’t happen by accident.

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