Giulia - M

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.

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.

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

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 .

She returned to the Lambrate warehouse and began her most ambitious work yet: The Unfinished City . The Unfinished City is not a single artwork. It is a series of twelve installations, each housed in a different abandoned building across Milan. Each installation corresponds to one of the city's neglected senses: the sound of a tram line that no longer exists, the smell of the Navigli canals before they were covered, the texture of a cinema carpet from 1974. That period became her unspoken graduate school

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."

Giulia M.'s "The Unfinished City" runs through November. By appointment only. No photography. Bring nothing. Leave changed. So does a room

"I'm not nostalgic," she insists. "Nostalgia is lazy. I'm interested in grief for futures that never arrived . That's different."

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.