“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” – Nan Goldin

The collaboration between Virginia Valeri and Giulia Gr for her first solo exhibition, originates from a private and intimate connection that slowly evolved into the desire to create a space capable of holding fragility, memory, and transformation as lived experience. The project took form in the aftermath of a profound emotional rupture around the Spring Equinox of 2025, experienced as a collapse, a purge, and a ritualistic emotional reset. Melancholia Archive emerges from necessity, born from a visceral need to hold on. It marks a pause in time, a moment of looking back, an act of acknowledging Giulia Gr’s life and artistic trajectory across 10 years of material.

Melancholia Archive presents a decade-long journey through Giulia Gr’s visual journaling practice, through four core bodies of work. The Body / Sexuality (2018–2020) explores hair, skin, eroticism, lovers, and intimacy, presenting the body as an archive and vulnerability as a language; The Portraits focuses on family—especially her grandmother—and relational intimacy as the core of emotional identity; The Flowers reflects on shadows, fragile forms, femininity, and beauty, rejecting decorative “girlishness” while affirming vulnerability as strength; and Spirituality, her most recent research, introduces a growing symbolic dimension, with moons, rituals, veils, altars, and lunar imagery shaping an intimate cosmology.

In Giulia Gr’s research, photography does not function as mere documentation but as a survival mechanism. It is the voice she found when the urge to create transformed into the need to archive. The act of photographing becomes a way to breathe; a way to release emotional weight, to translate sensations into images, to make a feeling visible so it can be carried. The archive becomes a place of devotion; a sacred space where relationships, bodies, encounters, gestures, and fleeting moments are preserved as acts of care. The anxiety of forgetting, of losing people, emotions, and connections, delegates to each image the responsibility to resist disappearance; every photograph becomes an act of preservation against loss.

Deeply influenced by artists who transformed their inner necessity into artistic language, from Francesca Woodman to Nan Goldin, Giulia Gr’s practice aligns with a lineage of image-making born from fear of forgetting and the urgency to survive emotionally.

The exhibition was conceived specifically for GlogauAIR, the space that has been so important throughout Giulia Gr’s years in Berlin. The spatial tripartition of the show guides the visitor along a precise, ritualistic passage: moving from one room to the next, the viewer is led through three dimensions of the artist’s self. The first space is the most intimate and interior, displaying self-portraits and images that confront the body as a site of vulnerability and self-recognition. The second room expands outward, transforming the archive into a relational altar: here, memories extend beyond the self and embrace friends, lovers, family, and loved ones; a journey made of feelings and connections, where photography becomes an act of devotion to shared experience. The final room gathers the last ten years into a video work that composes her photographs into a continuous flow, tracing the golden thread of melancholia that runs through her life. The visitor, compelled to move forward through the space, simultaneously looks backward, witnessing how memory, intimacy, and loss sediment into an archive of becoming.

Melancholia Archive reveals an artistic practice that seeks immersion within life. It is a work born from fear, love, memory, and necessity. An archive of emotions. An archive of presence. An archive of survival.

Artist: Giulia Gr @giuliag.r

Curator: Virginia Valeri @vorginger

Exhibition Design: Bebe Le @haut_lecoeur

Sound Installation: AT-XYA @at_xya

Virginia Valeri is an Italian art historian who graduated from the University of Pisa and is now a curator based in Berlin. In her dramaturgical and curatorial practice, she investigates how language and symbolic systems shape shared understanding and contemporary cultural narratives. Since January 2023, she is curator and head of production at MOLT.