When Poetry Becomes Sculpture: Giulia Cenci on T. S. Eliot and the Materials That Outlive Us

Born in Cortona in 1988, Giulia Cenci has built a practice that feels at once rooted in the realities of everyday life and haunted by something more primordial. Now living between Amsterdam and her hometown, Cenci works with the remnants of the world around us – industrial debris, discarded machinery, fragments of human and animal forms – recasting them as uneasy hybrids that hover between the recognisable and the otherworldly.

Her sculptures and installations, which have appeared everywhere from the Venice Biennale to New York’s High Line, refuse to privilege the human, instead placing us on equal footing with the materials, species and systems that shape and sustain us. At Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Cenci opens the institution’s new Project Space with The Hollow Men, a site-specific installation titled after T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem. To learn more, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand spoke with Cenci.

Keshav Anand: You’ve spoken about starting from poetry when you create – do you remember the very first poem that ever moved you enough to make art, even if it was years before you realised?

Giulia Cenci: I think the first time I used a poem to delineate a work was a piece by Eugenio Montale, I limoni. I clearly remember the sentence: “a pezzi, in alto, tra le cimase” (But the illusion fails, and time returns us / to noisy cities where the blue / is seen in patches, up between the roofs).

The way I could see a piece of sky, cut out by the outline of Italian classic architecture, and the way the poem turned into an image for me. The poetry was so strong, and it felt like it was talking about what I was looking for. I did not use the stronger sentences, but a little part I needed.

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose
s’abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l’anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità.

See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret.
Sometimes we feel we’re about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won’t hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.

But the relation with poetry – which is not always a starting point, but mostly an interconnection, a reminder, a coexistence – came earlier. I guess it started when, as a teenager, I found “my” poets, or at primary school, when we used to study poets such as Leopardi, who is capable of creating a world with just a few words.

KA: Your work often explores the hybrid nature of human, animal, and industrial forms. What draws you to these in-between states?

GC: The fact that I feel made by these things. It seems absurd to me to isolate humanity from its context, its essence, and the material of which it is made. It is obvious that we are dependent on our habitat, on machines, and our fellow species. We live in it, we use it, we eat it, and I think working on humanity today means finally putting humanity on the same level as what is necessary for it.

KA: The Project Space at Palazzo Strozzi is a brand-new ‘room’ for contemporary art – how does it feel to be the first to leave marks on those walls?

GC: The nice thing is that I usually look at previous exhibitions when I do a piece in a place with an exhibition history… in this case, the page was still white.

KA: Eliot wrote The Hollow Men in the aftermath of the First World War. Did you think much about how that sense of disillusionment might translate to our present moment?

GC: I came across the poem when I was already working on the installation. I clearly had in mind this group of bipeds who are unable to connect with each other and understand what is going on around them. They form a community of isolated beings, and yet when you look at them from a distance, they are part of an army that shares the same conditions. When I read the poem, I froze.

We live in a completely different time from the one Eliot describes: traumatised by an actual war whose trauma was so persistent that it created The Hollow Men. Yet I felt that this inability to act, to move, to be aware, also belongs to our present time. Eliot’s “hollow men” were traumatised by something. I feel like the figures I’m working on aren’t able to recognise and see the trauma that surrounds them.

KA: Many of your materials come from the industrial world and from found objects. How do you decide what’s worth keeping, reshaping, or discarding?

GC: I try to keep a balance between a spontaneous approach and researching objects and materials that interest me. Often, something becomes part of my vocabulary because I’m looking for a certain shape, feeling, or attitude. Other times, I simply come across things that become part of a work. I really like the fact that I often only find out why something has become so important after I have used it. I don’t mind if I’m not aware of it while I’m making it, and I don’t mind if I’m not fully aware of it when the work is done.

I have a huge amount of collected objects: bathtubs, shower stalls, car seats, car parts, mechanical parts in general, farm machinery… I especially like it when things become useless, obsolete for their use, and when I feel they can become a good extension or container for the body, or even a holding point for it. I don’t necessarily use things right away. Most of these items sit for months, or years, and then suddenly I know what I want to do with them. It’s a bit like a dictionary, and together with the sculptures they eventually become a sentence.

KA: To change pace for a moment, who would be your dream dinner party guest, dead or alive?

GC: A chimera.

KA: And what are you currently listening to in the studio?

GC: Nothing.



Giulia Cenci: The Hollow Men is on view at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze until 31 August 2025.



Feature image: Giulia Cenci: The Hollow Men, exhibition view, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, Project Space, 2025. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze