JULIJA KASTELUČI
Music & Theatrical Performance Artist
Melina Mercuri Hall | Sunday 5 October 2025
Julija Kasteluči returned to ArtCinema as a sonic patron, presenting a two-minute performance at Melina Mercuri Hall.
Presenting her intimate 2 minute performance;
H O R I Z O N T A L
Julija invited guests to enter the space one at a time. While inside guests would witness her lying down, singing a Japanese lullaby, using it as both form and force. The lullaby transcends language, detaching it from meaning and returning it to breath as a medium of effect and memory.
Her voice, repetitive and stretched in duration creates a soft gravitational pull. The work proposes a form of intimacy beyond touch, a sonic closeness in which the voice becomes atmosphere.
Intimacy in this work is not tactile, but vibarational, carried through the body by way of sound. It is not about understanding the words, but about the feeling their residue, their rhythm and their weight.
Julija’s horizontal posture disrupts conventional performance heirarchies, positioning care, tenderness and deep listening as an inverse to witness. In this space, the audience does not look, they listen, absorb and remember.
H O R I Z O N T A L
Is not a spectacle, it is an offering.
Julija is a conceptual and performance artist working across sound, voice, video and spatial installation. Her practice explores the emotional and sculptural qualities of sound, using her distinctive vocal style to create immersive, site-responsive experiences.
Through performance and spatial intervention, she creates temporary environments that invite audiences into a direct and often intimate encounter with sound, space and emotion.
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My practice is a relationship to the ways of presenting what I want to express, and the modes of expression within that practice are not fixed - in fact, they are fluid. One could say it is a practice within a practice, in which my relation to traditional three-dimensional exhibition practices is in constant redefinition, while I am in continuous search for the situational. In searching for the situational, I extract the essence, abstract it, and transform it into a form that is placed within a specific context, time, and space. Yet sometimes the very act of searching nullifies both time and space, becoming a de-contextualized situation - or rather, one with its own singular context, which at times may not be entirely legible.
When I enter a work, that is, a world I am creating, as I walk through that world, the act of walking itself becomes my work, and that gives me a kind of structure. I do not focus on a specific medium, but on the idea, on the content, on research and experimentation. Through my work I also explore how we see, how we hear, how our biology, our history, our bodies influence our perception and our understanding of ourselves and the world.
I am interested in the relationships we have with one another through immaterial aspects. I strive for my work to carry less narration and more of an emotional, sensorial landscape. The situations I create are in fact a kind of entity, whose time and space - the conditions in which that entity appears - are integral to its manifestation. In this sense, if I had to give a name or definition to what I do, for now I would say I am a situational artist: I create situations, sonic situations, sometimes sonic speculative fictions, unnamed fragments, environments, experiences.
I move across fields, disciplines, and practices in search of my own language through which I communicate. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find the language, or rather, a dialect of a language I already know, which allows me to communicate with witnesses.
Once I find the language/dialect through which I can communicate, I then use it in the same way I create situations - not so much objects (when I say “object,” I don’t mean only sculpture or painting; it can be something that has a certain compactness, an ephemeral form of existence, of living). I use a language that has multiple dialects; I don’t always speak in the same dialect, but I believe the root of the language is always the same - and that root is the one I discovered when I was 7 years old. I knew then that it was my language.