Giulia M [UPDATED]

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.

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.

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

She is also rumored to be writing a book. Not an artist's monograph, but a novel—one she says is "about a woman who builds a house out of other people's alarm clocks."

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. She returned to the Lambrate warehouse and began

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

After a restless stint at the Brera Academy, where she abandoned painting for found-object installation, Giulia vanished from the art school circuit. For three years, she worked as a night janitor in a neuroscience lab. By day, she slept. By night, she watched EEG readouts and collected discarded lab equipment: PET scan films, broken oscilloscopes, vials of saline. Each installation corresponds to one of the city's

"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."