Baroque monsters, porcelain sculpture, queer bodies, migrant identities What If The Holiest Body Is A Monster? A monster at the altar changes how you see the sacred. We sit down with Vienna-based sculptor Julia Belova to trace how porcelain, silicone, latex, and candy-bright surfaces grow into new bodies that are at once inviting and unsettling. Rooted in a lifelong fascination with Baroque intensity, Julia uses excess, ornament, and movement to question who gets to decide what is holy, desirable, or human. The conversation opens up the architecture of power—religion, patriarchy, and the gaze—and asks how a queer practice can reclaim spectacle without surrendering agency. Julia brings us inside her largest project to date, Monstrum Sacrum, installed in the historic church Dominikanerkirche in Krems. She explains how the sculptures engage the site and how process videos hung like icon doors, bridge Orthodox memory with a Catholic setting. Scale becomes a statement of existence: a queer, migrant body that takes up space without apology. We talk about masks, visibility, and why hybridity—human, animal, alien—captures the migrant feeling of being seen and mis-seen at once. Across the hour, we unpack how femininity, sensuality, and fluid gendered energies live in abstraction. Julia resists labels while drawing from the female body’s pleasures and strengths, crafting forms that suggest folds and flowers without pinning them down. The result is a practice that turns beauty into a question: is the sweetest surface a lure or a shield? By reframing Baroque exuberance through a queer lens, Julia finds spirituality not in purity but in honesty—the courage to show all parts, even the monstrous ones, as worthy of reverence. If this conversation shifts how you see sacred spaces, sculpture, or the bodies we deem acceptable, share it with a friend, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss our next deep dive.
