Julia Schäfer is a Paris-based artist whose video works and site-specific installations explore narratives of loss by blurring documentary and fiction. Emerging from investigations into her family’s butchery, her work reflects on meat production as a metaphor for the dialectics of pleasure and pain, violence and sustenance.

Her work has been shown recently at Non-Étoile Paris (2026), Supergau Festival, Salzburg (2025), Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (2025), EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin (2020). She has received grants from Stiftung Kunstfonds, Akademie der Künste Berlin, the State of Baden-Württemberg and was a fellow at Cité Internationale des Arts (2024). Her book SOLID OBJECTS was published in 2026. 

For Zu Gast bei Urbane Künste Ruhr, she combines research into the tanning trade in the Ruhr region with Norbert Montaudoin’s Le Journal des Écorchés (1995–2006). Together with the writer Samuel da Costa , she explores issues relating to dirty work, hygiene and social class.