Francesca Zappia

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’.