Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is a curatorial duo founded in Paris in 2008. They have developed an extensive range of production strategies and invented exhibition formats working closely with pioneers such as Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer West, Miltos Manetas, Cheryl Donegan, Haroon Mirza, Pauline Curnier Jardin, and others. Establishing new alliances between art and reality, the team has not only operated in museums and academic contexts but also in a wide variety of physical and mediatic spaces.
Francesco Urbano Ragazzi was commissioned with projects for, among others, MMCA (Seoul), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Missoni (New York), CERN (Geneva), Bucharest Biennale, Maraya Art Centre (Sharjah), Centro Ricerca Castello di Rivoli (Turin), ISCP (New York), Reykjavik International Film Festival, Centre d’Art Contemporain Gèneve, La Loge (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Institut Français (Paris), Ikon (Birmingham), Futura (Prague), Ruya Foundation (Baghdad), Emirates Foundation (Abu Dhabi). In 2012 they curated Io Tu Lui Lei, the first institutional exhibition about the cultural legacy of LGBTQ+ movements in Italy, with the support of the National Ministry of Equal Opportunities. Since 2017 the team has directed the archive of feminist artist Chiara Fumai, also organizing the main retrospective exhibition of her work and comprehensive publication. In 2021, the duo co-edited FUORI!!! 1971-1974 (Nero Editions), an award-winning anthology dedicated to the first LGBTQ+ magazine in Italian history. The same year Francesco Urbano Ragazzi was appointed artistic director of LIAF, the longest-running contemporary art biennial in Scandinavia, whose seventeenth edition took place between Venice, Oslo, and the Lofoten Islands in 2022.
The duo held lectures and seminars in academic contexts such as Collège International de Philosophie, Nordland School of Arts and Film, Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, ZHdK Zurich, Universiteit Antwerpen. Their words have been published in magazines such as Flash Art, Purple, NERO, South as a State of Mind, Mousse, CURA, and Spike.