"Fashion wants the aesthetic of depth without the weight," she says now, not bitterly but factually. "I don't make decoration. I make rituals."
That period became her unspoken graduate school. "The lab taught me rhythm," she says. "The brain has frequencies. So does a room. So does a broken chair." In 2019, a small gallery in the Brera district agreed to host a solo show for an unknown artist named "Giulia M." The installation was simple: a single room, darkened. In the center, a series of suspended copper plates, each salvaged from a different decommissioned hospital. Around them, electromagnetic field listeners—repurposed from her lab days—emitted low, shifting tones.
And perhaps that is Giulia M.'s true medium: not metal, not sound, not memory. Just attention. Radical, patient, unsentimental attention. In a world that screams for your focus, she offers a whisper. And if you lean in close enough—you will finally hear what you've been missing.
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." giulia m
Her materials read like a crime scene inventory: melted vinyl records from a flooded Naples archive, glass shards from a 1980s nightclub mirror, rainwater collected from the rooftops of five different psychiatric hospitals. Nothing is arbitrary. Every inclusion is a citation. In 2022, Gucci came calling. Alessandro Michele, then creative director, asked her to design the sound environment for a runway show in a deconsecrated church. She agreed—but only if she could also build the floor. The result was a catwalk of compressed ash from a burned forest in Calabria, embedded with contact microphones. As models walked, the floor emitted a dry, granular crackle.
She lives alone with a blind cat named Zero and a piano she cannot play but claims to "listen to." She rises at 4:00 AM daily. She does not own a smartphone. She corresponds by handwritten letter. Giulia M. has just announced her first major museum exhibition outside Europe: at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, followed by the Barbican in London. The work, titled A Dictionary of Lost Touches , will consist of 100 small machines, each designed to replicate a touch that no longer exists: the feel of a payphone receiver, the snap of a VHS clamshell case, the weight of a car ashtray.
After a restless stint at the Brera Academy, where she abandoned painting for found-object installation, Giulia vanished from the art school circuit. For three years, she worked as a night janitor in a neuroscience lab. By day, she slept. By night, she watched EEG readouts and collected discarded lab equipment: PET scan films, broken oscilloscopes, vials of saline. "Fashion wants the aesthetic of depth without the
"It's about the collective unconscious of a place," she explains. "A city is not its landmarks. A city is its abandoned conversations."
This is the story of Giulia M.—an artist who dismantles the walls between disciplines and, in doing so, rebuilds the way we experience art. Born Giulia Marchetti in the foothills of Bergamo in 1992, she was not a child prodigy in the traditional sense. She did not paint perfect frescoes at seven or compose sonatas at ten. Instead, she collected things: the hum of a tram cable, the grain of worn cobblestone, the way frost fractured light across a car window. Her father, a luthier, taught her that wood has memory. Her mother, a librarian, taught her that silence is a language.
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. "The lab taught me rhythm," she says
When asked why she keeps her philanthropy anonymous, she shrugs. "Fame is a material, too. It has a frequency. I don't want to corrupt the signal."
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."