Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art
 

Francesca Zappia

The image shows a detail from a collage made of paper cuttings combining a cactus tree, a leg of a woman wearing parachute pants, three Matakam huts that can be identified as cylindrical long pointy thatched roofs, a cat and meerkat.
Valentyna Dolottseva, Monuments for the Present - Collage, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Paria Goodarzi
The image shows a detail from a collage made of paper cuttings combining decorative elements, blue and white Eyo festival hats (Nigeria), golden domes from the cathedral in Kiev, and details from Renaissance Sculptures.
Inna Hordiiko, Monuments for the Present - Collage, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Paria Goodarzi
The image shows a collage made of paper cuttings combining parts of a photograph of the Shawlands cross and a star-shaped form made with colourful decorative elements.
Tanisha Sarkar, Monuments for the Present - Collage, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Paria Goodarzi
The image shows a detail from a collage made of paper cuttings combining images of mangoes, cacti, islamic ornamental elements and plaster copies of eyes, noses, ears from Renaissance sculptures.
Sadaf Syeda, Monuments for the Present - Collage, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Paria Goodarzi
The image shows a collage made of paper cuttings combining images of custard apple, pyramidal monuments, nigerian huts, stones and soil
Rezvan Faghani, Monuments for the Present - Collage, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Paria Goodarzi

Francesca Zappia is an Italian curator and researcher based in Glasgow. Her work explores the potentialities of artistic and curatorial research in passing on cultural memory and producing fresh knowledge. Her practice takes a context-specific approach that develops through long-term conversations with artists, students, and communities and results in artwork commissions. Reflecting on the curator's responsibility to connect art and audiences, besides organising exhibitions, she explores new ways of dissemination, online, on paper, or through discursive events.

Since being awarded a curatorial research grant from the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, Francesca has focused on original and innovative ways of rethinking the value of artwork reproductions in art and heritage. Her book Flâneurs (2023) summarises the research carried out in the CNAP collection. She is also a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School of Art, where she works to reimagine pedagogical values for their plaster cast collection, and an invited researcher with the Haute Ecole d’art et design (HEAD), Geneva, to contribute to a research project that deconstructs and futures understandings of the ‘original’.

Projects