Giulia Zabarella is a visual and performance artist. She graduated in 2022 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as a Master's student of Professor Olaf Nicolai. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor's Degree from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (IT) and completed studies at Salzburg Summer Academy (2022), Maumaus Independent Study Program (2021) and Fondazione Antonio Ratti (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). She is an 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). She lives and works in Munich and Lisbon.
In empty spaces or public buildings, she observes how literary tropes, metaphors, cultural heritage and linguistic misunderstandings shape the way we speak to each other: language performativity in public and in private as architectural modules and theatrical mechanisms. She experiments with how language can be inhabited, bent, transformed by bodies and spaces; the collection and attuning of texts is the raw material of her practice. Whether becoming choral performances, radio pieces, installations or stage sets, her works engage the presence of both performers and public; in such way, other bodies become the direct, primary material to immediately test out textual intuitions and build sounding axes in space. Synchronicity, polyphony and the rough overlapping of several voices are both methodologies and materials. She employs the theatrical object of the choir as an aesthetic, spatial device (the tight mass, the anonymous mob) as well as a resounding, strong acoustic machine. By working with friends’ and collaborators’ voices, mother language, and bodies, she distances herself from the writing process and rids herself of a fixed notion of authorship. Constantly questioning the medium of her practice, she desires forms that reveal the fragility of spatial norms and of participatory assumptions.
All images and content © Giulia Zabarella 2024