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.
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. giulia m
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. All twelve pieces sold within a week
"It's about the collective unconscious of a place," she explains. "A city is not its landmarks. A city is its abandoned conversations." did not celebrate
She declined them all.