MATJAŠ DIEGO ZADEL DELLAMORTE
Artist Biography
Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte (formerly Matjaž Borovničar) is a Slovenian visual artist born in Koper in 1974. He lives and works in Piran, Slovenia.
He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in 1999. Between 2000 and 2002, he continued his education in Venice at the Università Internazionale dell’Arte (U.I.A.), Giudecca, focusing on the restoration of frescoes and wall paintings. He subsequently completed pedagogical and andragogical education at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
Alongside his independent artistic practice, Zadel Dellamorte has maintained a long-standing involvement in art education. He teaches visual art, design and technology and has organised and led creative workshops. This parallel engagement with artistic production and education has remained an important part of his professional activity.
Initially rooted in painting, his practice has progressively developed into a distinctly interdisciplinary body of work encompassing painting, printmaking, photography, video art, installation, object and assemblage, artist’s books, poetry, sound and performative elements.
At the centre of his work is the transformation of personal and collective experience into a visual and symbolic language. Recurring subjects include identity, migration, the body, memory, loss, death, mourning, absence and transformation. Rather than treating an artwork solely as an aesthetic object, he frequently approaches it as a psychological and material space in which memory, lived experience and symbolic imagery can be reconstructed.
His visual language often moves between the intimate and the universal. Bodies, fragments, repetitive structures, ritual forms, architectural spaces and transformed objects operate as carriers of memory. Images are frequently subjected to processes of repetition, mirroring, fragmentation, layering and transformation, creating a tension between presence and absence, physical reality and psychological experience.
In his recent work, the relationship between art and lived experience has become increasingly central. Poetry, moving image and sound are integrated with visual material, allowing individual works to function simultaneously as image, narrative, emotional space and temporal experience.
The cycle Emotional Asphyxia represents an important development within this approach. Through video, poetry, assemblage, objects and other media, the project examines trauma, grief, memory and the psychological transformation of loss. Rather than illustrating experience literally, the works translate it into symbolic structures in which the body, memory and absence coexist.
His work has been presented in Slovenia and internationally, including exhibitions and projects in Italy, Austria, Croatia and other international contexts. In 2024, his work was presented at the Consulate General of the Republic of Slovenia in Klagenfurt, Austria, as part of the exhibition series A Window to the Neighbour, where he presented the series Where Are the Nymphs?. He has also participated in the May Salon of the Association of Slovene Fine Artists Societies (ZDSLU), one of Slovenia’s long-established national presentations of contemporary visual art.
Across different media, his practice is connected by a consistent concern: how an experience becomes memory, how memory becomes an image, and how an image can become a form of transformation.
EMOTIONAL ASPHYXIA
In the abyss of emotions,
where the soul loses itself among illusions,
a river of subtle sensations is born,
flowing through the most fragile paths.
Emotional asphyxia envelops me,
like a veil that absolves the heart.
Thoughts become confused, they merge,
in a whirlwind of emotions that escape.
Joy dances with sadness,
anger mingles with tenderness,
fear and hope brush against each other,
in a tango of feelings that embrace.
Tears become words,
they loosen the deepest and most burdensome knots,
revealing the hidden vulnerability
that makes the human soul what it is.
Emotional asphyxia is a stormy sea
that overwhelms me without giving me respite,
like a scorpion
that stings me relentlessly.
Through emotions, I feel alive.
In their colors I find my essence,
giving depth to existence.
And so I embrace emotional asphyxia,
letting it flow without fear or pretence,
because only through its intense embrace
can we live an authentic existence.
ANALYSIS
The poem explores the theme of emotional asphyxia: an experience of inner suffocation arising from the intensity of emotions that overwhelm the individual.
Through a play of contrasts, joy and sadness, anger and tenderness coexist, creating a dynamic landscape of intertwined emotions. Emotional asphyxia becomes a symbol of the struggle with one's own vulnerability, but also of the depth that only lived emotional experience can give to life.
The conclusion suggests an attitude of acceptance and an embrace of one's emotional nature as a path toward living an authentic and complete existence.
The collection contains the songs of Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte.
Songs of Death.
Songs of Emotional Suffocation.
Songs in which the body speaks when the voice falls silent.
It is not only music.
It is a passage.
It is a contact between life and dissolution.
Dellamorte — Where pain becomes beauty.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4mXN07VRoXs
EMOTIONAL ASPHYXIA
A Literary and Psychological Reading
Emotional Asphyxia can be read as a poetic representation of the inner condition that remains after a traumatic experience has formally ended but continues to exist within the individual.
The title contains the central metaphor of the poem. Asphyxia is literally a deprivation of air; emotionally, however, it becomes the image of a psychological state in which grief, memory, fear and unresolved pain occupy so much inner space that breathing itself seems restricted. The individual is alive, yet does not experience life with its former freedom. Something invisible constricts the interior world.
In this sense, “emotional asphyxia” does not describe physical suffocation. It describes the sensation of being psychologically enclosed by what has happened.
The poem is closely connected to the artist's personal confrontation with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It should not be understood as a clinical description of the disorder, but as its transformation into poetic language. Where medicine uses diagnostic terminology, poetry speaks through images, rhythm, repetition, silence, absence and metaphor.
Trauma in the poem belongs simultaneously to the past and to the present. The traumatic event may already be over, but emotionally it has not completely disappeared. Memory refuses to remain only memory. It enters the present and becomes an active force.
This temporal disturbance is fundamental to the work.
The past is not simply remembered.
It is re-experienced.
For this reason, the poetic subject exists between two realities: the external world, in which time continues normally, and an internal world in which certain emotions remain suspended. The individual moves forward biologically and chronologically, while a part of the psyche remains attached to what has been lost, experienced or endured.
The metaphor of suffocation therefore becomes particularly precise. Air normally moves freely. Breath is circulation, rhythm and life. Emotional asphyxia appears when that circulation is interrupted: the same memories, emotions and questions return, occupying the space in which something new might otherwise emerge.
Yet the poem is not simply a description of helplessness.
Its deeper structure is a struggle for transformation.
By giving the traumatic experience a title, a poetic form and finally a voice, the artist performs an important reversal. What was previously experienced internally and perhaps without adequate language becomes an external object: a poem.
Pain is transformed into language.
Memory becomes image.
Silence becomes sound.
The internal experience becomes something that can be observed, heard and shared.
This is one of the central paradoxes of Emotional Asphyxia: a poem about the impossibility of breathing becomes, through artistic creation, a form of breathing.
The work therefore exists between two opposing movements. One movement leads inward, toward confinement, grief, repetition and psychological pressure. The other leads outward, toward articulation, artistic construction and communication.
Neither completely cancels the other.
The poem does not claim that trauma simply disappears through artistic expression. Nor does it present healing as a clean progression from suffering to resolution. Instead, it suggests that transformation may consist in acquiring a different relationship to what cannot be erased.
The wound remains part of personal history, but it no longer has to remain without form.
Memory and absence
Another central element of Emotional Asphyxia is absence.
Absence is normally understood as emptiness — the fact that someone or something is no longer present. In traumatic memory, however, absence can paradoxically acquire enormous presence.
What is gone can dominate consciousness precisely because it is gone.
The absent becomes psychologically present through memory.
The poem inhabits this contradiction. Loss produces an empty space, yet that empty space is filled with recollection, emotion and repetition. The result is a peculiar state in which presence and absence can no longer be clearly separated.
This is why the emotional world of the work approaches mourning but cannot be reduced to mourning alone. It also concerns the persistence of memory and the difficulty of separating the self from an experience that has become embedded within identity.
The body as psychological space
The word asphyxia also brings the body into the poem.
Trauma is not represented solely as an abstract thought. It is experienced as something bodily: pressure, constriction, immobility, exhaustion, interrupted rhythm.
The body consequently becomes a metaphorical archive.
It remembers what consciousness might wish to place safely in the past.
Through this connection between psychological suffering and bodily imagery, the poem refuses to separate mind from body. Emotion is not presented as something distant or intellectual. It has weight. It occupies space. It presses against the body.
This gives the title its disturbing effectiveness.
The emotional experience becomes almost material.
Between death and survival
Death and disappearance in Emotional Asphyxia should not necessarily be interpreted literally. They also function as symbols of psychological transitions.
Trauma frequently divides experience into a before and an after.
The person who emerges from the experience is biologically the same individual, yet something in his understanding of himself and the world may have changed permanently.
In this sense, death becomes the metaphorical death of a previous state of existence.
Transformation does not restore the former self.
It produces another one.
This is why the poem ultimately exists not only in the territory of suffering but also in the territory of survival. Survival here is not heroic. It is fragile, repetitive and sometimes exhausting.
But it continues.
Poetry as testimony
At its deepest level, Emotional Asphyxia is therefore a testimony.
Not testimony in the documentary sense, because the poem does not need to reconstruct every external circumstance of trauma. Its subject is what remains inside the individual after the event.
It documents an internal reality.
The poem refuses the idea that an experience ceases to exist simply because the event itself has ended. Instead, it asks what happens when memory becomes inseparable from identity and when a person has to construct a new relationship with his own past.
The answer offered by the work is not forgetting.
It is transformation.
From poem to videopoetry
When the poem is joined with moving image, music and a slowly sung female voice, Emotional Asphyxia acquires another dimension.
The poem is no longer only read.
It is embodied in duration.
The slowness of the voice forces language to unfold gradually, while the musical structure creates pauses and spaces around individual words. The viewer cannot simply pass rapidly through the text. The work demands time.
Voice, image and sound create a psychological environment rather than illustrating one another literally.
This distinction is important.
The video does not function as a visual explanation of the poem. Instead, poetry and image coexist as two forms of memory. The voice introduces language; the moving image introduces transformation; music introduces emotional duration.
Together they create the experience of being suspended between memory and disappearance, pain and transformation, constriction and release.
Why “Emotional Asphyxia”?
Ultimately, the title names a contradiction.
To be emotionally asphyxiated means to feel that an invisible experience is taking away the psychological space necessary to breathe freely.
Yet the very existence of the poem proves that complete suffocation has not occurred.
There is still a voice.
There is still language.
There is still an image.
There is still creation.
For this reason, Emotional Asphyxia can be understood not only as a work about trauma, grief and PTSD, but also as a work about the attempt to transform an experience that once seemed impossible to articulate.
The poem does not erase trauma.
It gives trauma a language.
And in giving it language, the artist begins to recover the space in which breathing — emotionally, psychologically and artistically — can once again become possible.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
My artistic practice is rooted in the transformation of lived experience into visual, material and temporal forms. I work across painting, photography, video, installation, assemblage, artist's books, poetry and sound, allowing each medium to become part of a broader symbolic language.
Memory, loss, identity, the body, death, mourning and transformation recur throughout my work. I am particularly interested in what remains after an experience has ended: how memory persists, how absence can acquire a physical presence, and how psychological experience can be translated into image, object, language and sound.
I do not approach art as illustration of experience. Instead, I use artistic processes to dismantle, repeat, fragment and reconstruct it. Repetition, mirroring, layering, altered bodies, wings, architectural structures and ritual forms frequently appear in my visual vocabulary. They create spaces in which presence and absence, vulnerability and survival, life and death can coexist.
In my recent work, poetry and moving image have become increasingly interconnected. Language introduces another dimension to the visual field: what cannot be fully represented through an image can enter through a word, a voice, a pause or silence.
The cycle Emotional Asphyxia develops directly from this approach. It explores trauma, grief and post-traumatic experience not as subjects observed from the outside, but as psychological realities translated into artistic form.
For me, artistic creation does not erase what has happened. It transforms the relationship between experience and memory.
The artwork becomes a place where something that was once internal and formless can acquire a body, an image, a voice and, ultimately, the possibility of being communicated.
ABOUT THE VIDEOPOEM
EMOTIONAL ASPHYXIA
Artist / Filmmaker / Poet: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Year: 2026
Country of Production: Slovenia
Category: Videopoetry / Poetry Film
Duration: 2 min 56 sec
Aspect Ratio: 1:1
Language: English
Format: Digital Video / MP4
Emotional Asphyxia is an experimental videopoem exploring trauma, grief, absence, memory and the persistence of emotional pain.
The work combines moving image, original poetry, music and a slowly sung female voice into a single audiovisual environment. Rather than constructing a conventional narrative, the video develops as a psychological space in which images appear, transform, disappear and return.
The title refers to an internal form of suffocation: a condition in which memory and emotional pressure seem to occupy the very space required to breathe freely.
The work is closely connected to the artist's personal experience of post-traumatic stress disorder. It does not attempt to clinically represent PTSD. Instead, it translates subjective experience into a poetic and visual language in which fragmentation, repetition, memory, bodily presence and transformation become central elements.
Emotional Asphyxia asks what remains within a person after a traumatic event has ended — and whether artistic creation can give form to an experience that initially resisted language.
DIRECTOR'S / ARTIST'S NOTE
Emotional Asphyxia emerged from the need to give form to an experience that could not be expressed adequately through a single medium.
The poem came from language. The video came from images. The sound introduced another emotional dimension. I eventually understood these not as separate components but as different manifestations of the same psychological experience.
The work therefore deliberately avoids conventional storytelling.
There is no beginning followed by explanation and resolution. Trauma rarely behaves in such an orderly way. Memory returns through fragments. Images repeat. Certain sensations disappear and suddenly re-emerge. Time can feel suspended.
The visual structure of Emotional Asphyxia follows this instability.
For me, one of the central questions of the work is whether something painful can be transformed without being denied.
I am not interested in aestheticizing trauma in order to make suffering beautiful. I am interested in the possibility that artistic form can create a distance from experience without erasing its truth.
The final work therefore exists somewhere between testimony and transformation.
It is not a reconstruction of an event.
It is an attempt to visualize what remains afterward.
VISUAL LANGUAGE
The visual language of Emotional Asphyxia is constructed through transformation rather than linear narration.
Recurring bodies, angelic figures, wings, architectural forms, symmetry, mirroring and fragmentation create an unstable visual territory. Images appear to exist between recognizable form and dissolution.
The angel is particularly significant. It does not function exclusively as a religious symbol. It can also be understood as a figure of transition: between body and spirit, presence and absence, life and death, memory and disappearance.
Architectural forms suggest thresholds, passages, corridors and spaces that must be crossed.
Mirroring and repetition destabilize the singular image. A body can become two bodies; one form can produce another; an image can simultaneously appear familiar and estranged.
The resulting visual space does not represent a physical location.
It represents an internal landscape.
SOUND, VOICE AND POETRY
Sound is not conceived as background accompaniment to the images.
The sung poem forms an independent layer of the work.
A slowly articulated female voice transforms the written poem into duration. Words are prolonged, separated and suspended within music, allowing pauses and silence to become part of the composition.
The contrast between the female voice and the artist's own authorship of the poem also introduces a distance between the person who experienced, the person who wrote and the voice through which the experience is ultimately heard.
Poetry, music and moving image therefore do not merely illustrate one another.
They coexist.
At certain moments they reinforce each other; at others they create tension.
The resulting videopoem is intended to be experienced as a unified audiovisual work in which language can become image, image can function as memory, and sound can give emotional duration to both.
PRODUCTION & CREDITS
Title: Emotional Asphyxia
Year: 2026
Concept: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Original Poem: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Visual Artwork: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Video / Moving Image: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Editing: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Artistic Direction: Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte
Country: Slovenia
Language: English
Duration: 2:56
Aspect Ratio: 1:1
Exhibition Format: Digital Video File / MP4
AI-Assisted Production Disclosure
The concept, original poetry, visual artwork, video and editing of Emotional Asphyxia are the work of Matjaš Diego Zadel Dellamorte.
AI-assisted tools were used as part of the production process for the musical arrangement and the sung female vocal interpretation of the artist's original poem.
The use of these tools forms part of the sound-production process and does not replace the authorship of the poem, concept, visual material or video composition.
To opombo bi vsekakor obdržal. FVPS ima v letošnjem razpisu celo posebno kategorijo New Technologies, kjer izrecno vključuje artificial intelligence, zato sama transparentna navedba uporabe AI pri zvoku ni nekaj, kar bi bilo v nasprotju z njihovim razpisom. Tvoje delo pa je še vedno smiselno prijavljeno kot Videopoetry, saj njihova definicija te kategorije izrecno govori o združevanju poezije oziroma besedila z vizualno podobo in zvokom.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS
Tukaj bi bil nekoliko previdnejši in ne bi na hitro pisal dolgega seznama, kjer bi lahko zamešala leto, institucijo ali status posamezne razstave.
Za EPK je bolj profesionalen naslov:
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS, SCREENINGS & PROJECTS
in potem samo 8–12 najmočnejših referenc, vsaka v obliki:
2027 — Exhibition / Festival — Institution — City, Country — artwork
2026 — Exhibition / Festival — Institution — City, Country — artwork
2025 — Exhibition — Institution — City, Country
Sem bi med drugim sodili tvoji potrjeni CICA Experimental Film and Video 2027, Pošasti so ljudje / Monsters Are Human, Majski salon, Oggetto Libro Milano, Celovec itd., vendar bi ta seznam sestavil posebej iz preverjenih podatkov, ne iz spomina.
Kaj bi še vizualno dodal na stran
Med te tekste daj 3–5 kakovostnih stillov iz videa. Eden naj bo takoj pod naslovom kot glavna slika, ostali pa med analizo in Artist Statementom. Čisto spodaj lahko ponovno vstaviš YouTube video.
To je koristno tudi zato, ker pravilnik FVPS določa, da lahko ob izboru uporabljajo stille, naslov, informacije o projektu ter biografske podatke za promocijo.
S tem ima EPK praktično vse: delo → poezija → analiza → artist statement → director's note → vizualni jezik → zvok/poezija → credits/AI disclosure → biografija → selected exhibitions → stills → video.
In točno URL te ene strani potem vneseš v “Promotional URL or Electronic Press Kit”.
