But ask her what she does, and she smiles. "I listen," she says. "Then I build a place for what I heard."
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. giulia m
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. But ask her what she does, and she smiles
To experience the full work, visitors must walk between locations—a pilgrimage of four hours. At each stop, Giulia M. has installed what she calls "memory vessels": interactive sculptures that change based on the time of day, the weather, and the number of previous visitors. The Unfinished City is not a single artwork
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.
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 .