Born in Padua in 1981, Francesca Todde (@francescatodde) is a visual artist whose work engages critically with the cultural and ethical dimensions of nature and human-animal relations. Her practice extends beyond image-making into design and independent publishing, working from Milan, Italy, where her projects often bridge visual culture, social inquiry and editorial experimentation.
Todde's artistic inquiry unfolds across multiple forms and cannot be confined to photography alone. Her formative training began in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, a background that continues to inform the material sensitivity and spatial awareness evident in her visual practice. Her subsequent exploration of photoengraving marked a pivotal transition toward photographic language, which she ultimately adopted as her primary medium while retaining a sculptural and tactile approach to image-making.
Her photographic practice centres on people who are reimagining what it means to be human, particularly those whose lives are shaped by close, everyday relationships with animals. She approaches this subject not as a romantic ideal, but as a critical inquiry into one of humanity's oldest bonds, one that remains deeply relevant as social and ecological conditions shift. For her, the shifting dynamics between humans and animals over the past century open a speculative space: a visual and conceptual arena in which to imagine how this bond might be reconfigured in the future.
This sustained engagement with human-animal relationships is not incidental to her research; it forms one of its central intellectual axes. She understands the present moment as a rare historical juncture, one that demands a recalibration of how societies organise themselves in relation to the natural world. Advances in scientific research into animal cognition have begun to challenge long-held assumptions of human exceptionalism, while the accelerating realities of climate change expose the consequences of exploitative systems, including industrial farming, ecological imbalance, monocultural practices and the rapid erosion of biodiversity.
Through her photography, she does not prescribe solutions but instead invites viewers to reconsider inherited hierarchies and to reflect on coexistence as both a moral and ecological necessity. Todde's time spent with the Sámi community in Finnish Lapland further informs this perspective. There, restraint and reciprocity guide relationships with nature, and taking more than necessary is understood as a disruption of ecological balance. For her, such indigenous knowledge offers a vital counterpoint to Western models, underscoring coexistence as both an ethical and ecological imperative.
One of her most striking bodies of work, An Emotional Reintegration, unfolds within the walls of Les Baumettes prison in Marseille. It is early afternoon in October when an unexpected presence enters the desolate exercise yard: a horse stepping onto the hardened earth of the courtyard. Behind the metal screens of the surrounding windows, inmates notice the animal almost instantly, first a murmur, then a shout, the news travelling cell to cell. This is An Emotional Reintegration.
The decision to work with prisoners is particularly impactful because it places her exploration of human-animal relationships within a context defined by extreme restriction, control and emotional deprivation. Prisons are spaces in which autonomy is suspended, and identities are reduced to systems of surveillance and discipline. By introducing an encounter with an animal into this environment, she creates a powerful rupture in the logic of incarceration, allowing vulnerability, care and non-verbal communication to surface where they are ordinarily suppressed. The prisoners' proximity to release further intensifies this moment, positioning the encounter as a threshold experience in which emotional reconnection becomes possible. In this setting, the human-animal bond is not symbolic or abstract but profoundly embodied, revealing its capacity to restore a sense of humanity within a space structured to deny it.
© Francesca Todde
The prisoners who have been invited to participate, men nearing the end of their sentences, emerge cautiously. They arrange themselves slowly, visibly unsettled, aware not only of the animal before them but also of the silent scrutiny of fellow inmates watching from above. The workshop that follows resists spectacle. Instead, it unfolds as a quiet, embodied encounter.
In its final moments, the participants close their eyes and release the reins, their gestures echoing the imagined freedom of a bird in flight. They lie across the horse's broad body, pressing themselves against its warmth and stillness, remaining there for long, unbroken stretches of time. Words fall away. Judgment dissolves. What remains is a shared, wordless exchange between humans and animals, an experience that the participants themselves describe as a process of emotional return, a fleeting restoration of connection within a space defined by isolation: An Emotional Reintegration.
