Munich-based artist Giulia Zabarella works across performance, site-specific sound, video, and installation. Zabarella’s practice examines language, collective voice, and the spatial dynamics of participation. Through choral structures, multilingual texts, and site-responsive sound works, she investigates how cultural memory, political speech, and everyday ritual are embodied and transmitted. The choir functions in her work as both an aesthetic device and a social model, articulating tensions between individual agency and collective formation.

During Zabarella’s residency at Pivô Salvador in Brazil, she developed her research project, Syncretic Futures: Performance Practices in Motion, exploring religious syncretism, Carnival, and Capoeira as intertwined performative histories of the body. While in Salvador, Zabarella was supported by curator Janaina Selva, who accompanied her process for the two-month residency.

As part of the residency, Zabarella attended Santo Amaro’s Bembé do Mercado festival and collaborated with Ocupação Estufa and local students on a workshop at Pivô. She also presented her film Tawny Pipit: Archive of Disappearance (made with Sol Archer) in a closed screening and hosted an Open Studio event. Zabarella also visited exhibitions on Pierre Verger and Carybé at Bahia’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The residency concluded with a research trip to Chapada Diamantina and Lençóis, where Zabarella furthered her investigation into Afro-diasporic histories, folklore, and syncretic religious practices within a landscape shaped by the 19th-century diamond rush and its colonial legacy.