Francesca Telling is an artist, facilitator and learning practitioner interested in how institutional and anti-institutional knowledge is produced between the archive, classroom, family and community. Rooted in archival research, her works aim to complicate hierarchies across forms of documentation – developing through understanding what is preserved or lost in the interpersonal making of diasporic histories. She collects objects, images and inherited memories, exploring how their re-emergence in photography, print, language and time-based media can make sense of fragmented records tied to people and place.

Francesca is often working with children and young people – through workshops and dialogues within and beyond the systems that disempower them. Responsive to local contexts and informed by anti-racist approaches, these collaborations hope to reimagine learning environments and their authority through emotional engagement with questions of empathy, togetherness, belonging and justice.

Recent work has been defined by youth-led investigations of local histories, utilising participatory photography, mapping processes and dialogue to make creative interventions into archive collections. Through engaging racially minoritised young people in conversations across time, these projects make collective discoveries about power and change at the sites of historical knowledge generation - activating the past in the imagining of more just futures.

Francesca is currently a studio resident at Metroland Cultures in Kilburn, Brent.