Giulia M — Limited

She is also rumored to be writing a book. Not an artist's monograph, but a novel—one she says is "about a woman who builds a house out of other people's alarm clocks."

Giulia's response is characteristically quiet. "I don't make sad work," she says. "I make work that doesn't lie about time. Time takes things. That's not tragic. That's physics."

"It's about the collective unconscious of a place," she explains. "A city is not its landmarks. A city is its abandoned conversations." giulia m

She declined them all.

The final installation, located in a former insane asylum on the outskirts, contains no objects at all. Only a single chair and a recorded voice—her mother, reading a list of every street in Bergamo that has been renamed since 1950. By the end, the listener is meant to understand that memory is not a photograph. It is a palimpsest. And we are all writing over each other's ghosts. Not everyone celebrates Giulia M. Critic Lorenzo Fabbri of Il Giornale dell'Arte has called her work "emotionally manipulative" and "structurally elitist." He points out that her installations require silence, time, and a willingness to stand in cold rooms for long periods. "This is not democracy," he wrote. "This is a religion with a guest list." She is also rumored to be writing a book

When pressed for details, she smiles again. That same quiet, knowing smile. "You'll hear it when it's ready." Standing in her warehouse at dusk, as the light slants through grime-streaked windows and Zero the cat naps on a pile of deconstructed radios, Giulia M. looks less like an artist and more like a watchmaker. She is hunched over a circuit board, attaching a wire no thicker than a hair. The room hums—not loudly, but present. A low G.

She has a point. Her newer works, including a 2024 piece called Joy as a Contact Force , is built from carnival ride scrap and children's playground bells. It emits erratic, laughing tones. Visitors have reported dancing. Off the record, Giulia M. is not the ascetic her public persona suggests. She cooks elaborate pasta meals for friends. She has a collection of ugly ceramic frogs. She cries during The Muppet Christmas Carol . She is also, quietly, a fierce advocate for arts education in Italian public schools, having anonymously funded six after-school sculpture labs in the past three years. "I make work that doesn't lie about time

Others accuse her of what they call "aesthetic melancholy"—a fetishization of decay that mistakes sadness for profundity.