Giulia M «LEGIT | HANDBOOK»

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.

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

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 fashion world anointed her

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. Only a single chair and a recorded voice—her

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.

Others accuse her of what they call "aesthetic melancholy"—a fetishization of decay that mistakes sadness for profundity.

She looks up. "That's the building remembering it used to be a tire factory," she says. "It's grateful someone's still listening."