Francesca Cavallo

About

Francesca’s work focuses on the ways in which art and design can be mobilised to transform public perceptions of risk and safety. She has worked extensively as a curator and art critic and completed her PhD at the University of Kent in May 2020. Her thesis, “Sensing Risk: art, aesthetics and the knowledge of the future”, argued that art is a safe space for cultivating resilience and protecting experimentation. Previously, Francesca curated the exhibition “Risk” at the Turner Contemporary, which was visited by over 91,000 people, and she has worked for Organising Disaster, a research project led by Goldsmith College Department of Sociology and funded by the European Research Council.

As a GCDC Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Arts, Francesca is working on a project funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund: “Acting before the emergency: artists, environmental disasters and climate change in Brazil”. The research project aims to support resilience to climate-related disasters in Brazil by researching artists working with Brazilian communities to make art about climate change. The project will build upon a network within Brazil to facilitate the positive impact of the artists’ work through educational and artistic initiatives. By examining how contemporary Brazilian artists frame environmental disaster, the project aims to test out the possibilities offered by the channels of artistic production to cultivate positions of criticality, awareness and hope in a country that is exponentially more divided by different economic interests and perceptions of risk.