Giulia Lazzara
concept architect / artist / author
Architect by training, I am drawn to unclaimed spaces. Using the scale of my own body, I build worlds through self-portraiture. Painting, sculpture, textiles and writing each contribute another fragment of an evolving ecosystem.
Within these imagined environments, life-sized bodies are porous rather than fixed: they become shelters, landscapes, vessels and sites of transformation. Interweaving myths, dreams and lived experience, I use symbolic narratives to explore how identity is reshaped through care, creation and coexistence with other forms of life. Fauns turn into human babies, swans predict the future and the hearth I’m carefully tending starts to look like a circus.
My practice dwells in the moment when inherited meanings no longer suffice and new ways of being have not yet fully emerged. The works emerge where memories, observation and intuitions overlap. Across all media, I am interested in acts of making space—making space within the body, within the home and within imagination.
My visual language brings together mythology, theater, natural history and the traditions of figurative painting, where animals, costumes and archetypal figures become unstable symbols that resist fixed interpretation. Like the architecture I inhabit, my body does not fight change—it makes room for it.
Jolien and Giulia working on a wedding dress surrounded by paintings and objects produced for the same performance. Italy, 2024. Picture by Loretta Sermenghi.