In love with any form of material culture, Francesca Conte has a background as Museum Anthropologist. Born in Rome and based in London, Francesca’s main interests are: collective memory, oral history, decolonisation of curatorial practice and East African art and cultures.
Francesca graduated with a MA in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography (University of Bologna). She specialized in Museum and Art Anthropology (University of Milan Bicocca) and African Studies (Dalarna University).
Francesca has launched a few projects linked to the lockdown such as a photographic project connected to the London Borough of Lewisham and Collecting London Lockdown. The latter is an ethnographic project which aims to record the lockdown experience in London through personal objects with the main objective of humanising this unprecedented event. She mainly uses photography and sound recordings to collect memories of local communities.
ARTIST COLLECTIVE BM
‘It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform.’
_____John Steinbeck
The British Museum is a space that surrounds you
with narratives of history, culture and humanity from all over the world. You
are surrounded by us too, members of staff who are exceptional artists and
great minds. When we are not working our full-time jobs in the Museum, we
deserve to be seen (as such).
We wear a black, unobtrusive uniform, that makes differentiating ourselves as individuals and creatives difficult. Once we step out of our stifling shirts, loosen our neckties, we actively become artists, curators, designers, writers and photographers. This change isn’t just physical, we transcend from being indiscernible shadows, to beings brimming with the energy to create.
The aim of this collective, is to promote the artists that cannot afford to practice full-time, whose talents are fascinating, the very reason we admire each other and have united as a group. This is a significant way that we can create our story. We are artists from around the world, who come from different cultures with different ways of life, we find different ways expressing ourselves through art. But we have the same feelings and concerns, under the same roof, that of the British Museum.
Has working in the British Museum inspired or affected the way that you look at, or make art now? Let’s build a monument to our own talents, to stand amongst those that continue to inspire us all.
We wear a black, unobtrusive uniform, that makes differentiating ourselves as individuals and creatives difficult. Once we step out of our stifling shirts, loosen our neckties, we actively become artists, curators, designers, writers and photographers. This change isn’t just physical, we transcend from being indiscernible shadows, to beings brimming with the energy to create.
The aim of this collective, is to promote the artists that cannot afford to practice full-time, whose talents are fascinating, the very reason we admire each other and have united as a group. This is a significant way that we can create our story. We are artists from around the world, who come from different cultures with different ways of life, we find different ways expressing ourselves through art. But we have the same feelings and concerns, under the same roof, that of the British Museum.
Has working in the British Museum inspired or affected the way that you look at, or make art now? Let’s build a monument to our own talents, to stand amongst those that continue to inspire us all.