📸 Exhibition views, CCA: Eoin Carey - Byres Community Hub: Paria Goodarzi. Billboards across the city: Iain Mackay

@maryhill-in.bsky.social @byreshub.bsky.social @seemescotland.bsky.social

The project has been supported by Glasgow International, Maryhill Integration Network, CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Byres Community Hub, See Me, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Refugee Festival Scotland, and JACK ARTS Scotland, part of the BUILDHOLLYWOOD Family.

These forms disrupt values intrinsic to traditional Western European monuments, providing space to re-imagine them as platforms for the diverse voices that make up Glasgow's social fabric.

The exhibitions and public art project present works created with different media and techniques, such as videos, collages and monuments made with soap.

Together, we have co-created an exhibition and public art project presented at the CCA, the Byres Community Hub at the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow, and Jack Arts Scotland / Buildhollywood four advertising spaces across the city centre and the Southside.

‘Monuments for the Present’ was a collaboration w. Beauty Osayomwanbor Nosa, Inna Hordiiko, Mehri Abdi, Rezvan Faghani, Sara Abdelnasser, Shahid Mahmood, Sadaf Syeda, Tanisha Sarkar, Tara Gomary, Tomilola Owolabi, Valentina Vodolazska and Valentyna Dolottseva from MIN's Museum of Things.

The complex power struggles around these contested sites have made room for new forms of representation within the public realm.

In recent years, public monuments in the UK have been the focus of debate and actions that have questioned dominant narratives of national identity that glorify violent imperialist extraction and white supremacy.

The exhibition is open to other iterations and developments. The videos and sound pieces in English and French are available to watch and listen on my website: www.francesca-zappia.art/tomorrow-nev...

As well as to Douglas Morland, Joanna Piece, and Katrin Kettenacker who actively contributed to the production of the video and sound pieces.

I am grateful to ‘The Grey Zone’ team, Pierre Leguillon, Mathias Pfund and Adélaïde Quenson, for their insights and support in delving into Geneva’s cast collections and archives; to Prof Lorenz Baumer, director of the Plaster Cast Collection for his enthusiasm for the project.

Using Laocoön as a case study, the exhibition interrogated the complex relationships between artworks and their analogue/digital reproductions, these acting as simulacra and expanded apprehensions of the original.

The exhibition featured two videos and a spatialised sound installation of my creation, the latter serving as an interpretative tool for the audience.

This collaboration resulted in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies. Laocoön’s Hyperrealities’ (2024), a site-specific curatorial intervention in the University of Geneva’s Plaster Cast Collection.