New York-based platform The World Around returned this year for the third edition of its annual summit.

The Summit was co-presented with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Het Nieuwe Instituut and curated by The World Around’s founder and executive director Beatrice Galilee. 

Global design practitioners shared recent projects that speak to internationally pressing issues including climate change, racial and social equity, ecology, Indigenous rights, digital technology and community. There were presentations both in person from the Guggenheim, as well as from speakers sharing projects from around the world including Tokyo, Beijing, Rosario, Brasilia, Milan, Zurich and Barcelona.    

Monument Lab's Director, Paul Farber presented Monument Lab’s research and compilation of ‘The National Monument Audit’. Over the past two years, monuments in the United States have seen a dramatic change. With dual calls to dismount and remove various historical figures, to adding new statues to the urban landscape of the United States, the presented audit paints a clear picture of the current political state of the country. Farber and his team spent a year scouring almost half a million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources to create a comprehensive list in order to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped the USA's monument landscape. Founded in 2012, Monument Lab is a non-profit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. The lab’s vision is to cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments by encouraging a participatory approach to public engagement and collective memory analysis.

The link to view Session One is available here.