FRANCESCA
ZAPPIA

I am a curator, writer, and researcher based in Glasgow, UK. I am currently undertaking a PhD at the Glasgow School of Art and lecturing in the MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) programme (Glasgow School of Art / University of Glasgow).

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My practice engages in dialogue with contemporary artists, diverse communities, and cultural institutions to investigate how knowledge and cultural memory are produced, transmitted, and reactualised across various temporalities, geographies, and creative methodologies. Working across research-led exhibitions, publications, and participatory and dialogic events, I explore how artistic and curatorial practices can challenge dominant epistemic structures and generate alternative, relational forms of knowledge-making.

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My research develops through an overarching enquiry into the potential of reimagining our relationship to heritage outside traditional Western epistemologies. A large part of my research explores the potential of reproductions of artworks in contemporary art to imagine the museum otherwise. What can be learned from the object when it is disentangled from the institutional framework? What other connections, relations, hybridities, and stories emerge throughout the circulation of the object? Can the copy trigger, or open the way to, acts of reparation and restitution?

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These enquiries are explored through research projects that examine artwork reproductions within institutional and archival contexts, participatory and dialogical methodologies that activate memory through situated and co-curated forms of engagement, and experimental approaches to narration and non-linear/polyphonic structures of interpretation.

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Across these contexts, my work connects research, pedagogy, editorial practice, and public engagement, with an emphasis on curatorial formats that operate between institutional structures and situated forms of knowledge production.