GIULIA ZABARELLA
Giulia Zabarella is a visual artist based in Munich and Paris. In 2022 she graduated in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as a Master's student of Professor Olaf Nicolai. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor's Degree in Painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (2016, IT) and completed studies at Salzburg Summer Academy (2022), Maumaus Independent Study Program (Lisbon, 2021) and Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Como, 2017). In 2022 she received the Grant for Visual Artists from the City of Munich (Stipendium für Bildende Kunst) as well as a studio grant for the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2024-2025). In 2025 she was awarded the Kunstfonds Stipendium by the German State, as well as the Theodora Von Mierlo Benedetti International Award for emerging artists. She is Alumna of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Her works and performances were shown, among other venues, at Kunstpavillon Munich (DE), Kunstpavillon Luzern (CH), Longega Project (IT), PLATFORM Munich (DE), Goethe Institut Lisbon (PT).
In her (choral) performances, site-specific sound and video installations, Giulia Zabarella observes how literary tropes, metaphors, cultural heritage and linguistic misunderstandings shape perception and encounters in everyday spaces. She considers language performativity in the public and private spheres as architectural modules and theatrical mechanisms, shaped and inherited by advertising, political propaganda, and family as well as collective histories. Experimenting with how language can be inhabited, bent, transformed by bodies and rooms, she employs the theatrical object of the choir as an aesthetic, spatial device (the tight mass, the anonymous mob) as well as an acoustic machine, capable to construct sound axes in space. By working closely with friends’ and collaborators’ voices, mother languages, and bodies, she questions the writing process and a fixed notion of authorship, engaging in movements of collage, reappropriation, remix, and rehearsal. Challenging the medium of her practice, she develops forms that reveal the fragility of spatial norms and of participatory assumptions.
Portrait by Sol Archer, Cité Internationale des Arts, spring 2025
