In the hushed, golden-hour light of her Milanese studio, Giulia M. does not so much create as she translates. She takes the frequency of a feeling—loss, wonder, the static of a crowded city—and renders it into physical form. To some, she is a sculptor. To others, a sound artist. To a growing global following, she is the architect of a new kind of sensory honesty.
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."
"I'm not nostalgic," she insists. "Nostalgia is lazy. I'm interested in grief for futures that never arrived . That's different."
Her process is forensic. When she built Mourning Machine (2021)—a kinetic sculpture made from the gears of a decommissioned funicular railway—she spent six weeks interviewing former railway workers. She recorded their voices, slowed them to subsonic frequencies, and embedded the audio into the sculpture's motor. When Mourning Machine runs, it does not sound like grief. It sounds like a mountain exhaling. giulia m
But ask her what she does, and she smiles. "I listen," she says. "Then I build a place for what I heard."
All twelve pieces sold within a week. Collectors included a Parisian fashion house and a private curator for the Venice Biennale. Giulia M. did not celebrate. She bought a warehouse in the Lambrate district and disappeared again. Giulia rejects the term "mixed media." She prefers psycho-materialism : the belief that materials carry emotional and historical frequencies, and that the artist's job is to activate them without distortion.
Giulia M.'s "The Unfinished City" runs through November. By appointment only. No photography. Bring nothing. Leave changed. In the hushed, golden-hour light of her Milanese
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.
Visitors entered one by one. They did not see "art" in the conventional sense. They saw relics. They heard a soundscape that changed based on their proximity to each plate. The closer they came, the higher the pitch. The show was called Resonance #4 .
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." To some, she is a sculptor
She declined them all.
Others accuse her of what they call "aesthetic melancholy"—a fetishization of decay that mistakes sadness for profundity.
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."
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.