Giulia Ottavia Frattini

Makers

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

9 October 2026

Makers

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

9 October 2026

Q: What first brought you to poetry, and when did you realise that it could become a way of thinking, not simply a way of writing?

A: I grew into poetry, I’d say. I always struggled with linear sense-making and had little interest in it, so poetry-making became an intuitive mode of inhabiting that resistance and giving it form. I recall the first unprompted text I wrote as a kid was a song lyric. Maybe the seed for bending language in some way was already there, but poetry itself happened much later. It was during my studies, as an interruption from them, and mainly as a reaction to academic wording. I started tinkering with that stilted and domesticated language, taking things out of context, seeing what else they could do or mean when the logical structure falls apart.

Q: Your work often moves between languages and cultures. What changes in your writing when you move from one language to another?

A: For me, language is a continuous negotiation. Moving between tongues triggers an internal friction, fracturing and reforming perception. It is about allowing the foreigner within the self to emerge and intrude. It is hospitality and dismissal all at once. Hélène Cixous writes, “my voice is my other,” and I find myself deeply aligned with this.

"Writing across languages feels like the manifestation of an alterity."

Q: Do you see translation as a loss, a transformation, or perhaps even a new form of authorship?

A: I don’t work with translation as a practice in itself, but I am fascinated by asymmetries: how a word changes in another tongue and how the entire cadence of meaning morphs. I think translation is less about decoding words and more a matter of capturing the texture of a concept as it crosses into unfamiliar territory… a sonic and semantic migration. It is also a leap of faith, where meaning always ends up a bit transmuted. I am drawn to these inherent impossibilities and to the inevitable non-finitude of translation.

Q: What interests you most about the moments when language fails to express something clearly?

A: That failure is what is closest to “reality.” When language breaks down, experience comes in its raw state, unmediated by the tidy constraints of explanation. It is undisciplined and, perhaps, more uncompromised.

Q: Does writing help you understand yourself, or does it make you question who you are?

A: Both and none. Or rather, writing helps me see, witness things, which is not necessarily the same as understanding. Mostly, it is not.

Q: What question about your own practice are you still trying to answer?

A: I am currently experimenting with how a language-based practice can exit the textual plane, exceeding the confines of the page and the verbal, to expand what having a voice might mean beyond those boundaries. On a more practical level, I am trying to figure out how to sustain poetry as a viable artistic practice within a market-driven culture that primarily craves the hyper-visual and the transparent, the narrative-obsessed, the immediately digestible. How to hold space for what resists resolution in a world led by relentless consumption.

Q: What places in Berlin you keep returning to?

A: There are a couple of places I visit repeatedly by choice, but I usually don’t return unless out of necessity. Somehow, Berlin is a city that doesn’t let me become attached to places—quite the contrary. I tend to think that it is precisely that sense of rejection and estrangement that keeps me here.