GIULIA ZABARELLA
Giulia Zabarella is a visual artist based in Munich (DE). In 2022 she graduated in Sculpture from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts 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 (IT, 2016) and completed studies at Salzburg Summer Academy (AT, 2022), Maumaus Independent Study Program (PT, 2021) and Fondazione Antonio Ratti (IT, 2017). In 2022 she received the Grant for Visual Artists from the City of Munich (Stipendium für Bildende Kunst der Landeshauptstadt München), 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 at CIAP Vassivière (FR), Pivô Salvador (BR), Under The Spell (UK), Kunstpavillon Munich (DE), Kunstpavillon Luzern (CH), Longega Project (IT), Galerie der Künstler*innen Munich (DE), Goethe Institut Lisbon (PT), among others.
In her (choral) performances, film works and sound installations, Zabarella observes how literary tropes, metaphors, cultural heritage and linguistic misunderstandings shape perception and encounters in everyday spaces. She considers language performativity in public and private as architectural modules and theatrical mechanisms, shaped and inherited by advertising, political propaganda, and family 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) that interrogates subjectivity, as well as an acoustic machine, which can build and shift sound axes in space. By working closely with her friends’ and collaborators’ voices, mother tongues, and bodies, she rehearses, collages and remixes texts and sources, questioning the writing process and any fixed notion of authorship. She is interested in challenging the medium of her practice, and in developing site-responsive forms that can reveal the fragility of spatial norms and of participatory assumptions.
Portrait by Sol Archer, Cité Internationale des Arts, spring 2025
Medusa's Ashes, rehearsals, Munich, summer 2025