Giulia M -

The fashion world anointed her. Vogue called her "the poet of decay." Offers arrived daily: a perfume bottle shaped like a fossil, a jewelry line made of melted circuit boards.

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

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." The fashion world anointed her

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. When she built Mourning Machine (2021)—a kinetic sculpture

"I grew up believing that every object holds a conversation," Giulia recalls, running a finger along a rusted spring on her worktable. "You just have to be quiet enough to hear it."