Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen.

www.assemblestudio.co.uk

Architect Afaina de Jong leads AFARAI, an Amsterdam-based architectural agency that specializes in spatial design and strategy. The studio’s aim is to cross the boundaries of the traditional architecture practice by dealing with the existing city with an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, integrating theory and research with design. Afaina has worked for renowned international firms before establishing her own firm in 2005. She now works on the boundary of architecture and art. Her work is deeply connected to represent people and cultural movements that are not traditionally represented in architectural form. By using form languages, colors, patterns and narratives that are other, she works towards a more inclusive experience of space.

Rotor develops critical positions through research and design. Besides projects in architecture and interior design, it also produces exhibitions, books, economic models and policy proposals. In 2016, the group launched Rotor DC – a cooperative that organizes the reuse of construction materials; dismantling, processing and trading salvaged building components.

Tavares Strachan’s artistic practice offers uniquely synthesized points of view on the cultural dynamics of scientific knowledge. Aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates monumental allegories that tell of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. His text-based neon sculptures are an anthem for our political and cultural moment, and his lexicon an effort to mobilize community and societal change. Strachan’s ambitious, open-ended practice has included collaborations with numerous organizations and institutions across the disciplines.

MASS Design Group was founded on the understanding that architecture’s influence reaches beyond individual buildings. MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) believes that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities to confront history, shape new narratives, collectively heal and project new possibilities for the future. Its team includes over 250 architects, landscape architects, engineers, builders, furniture designers, makers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers representing 20 countries across the globe. They believe in expanding access to design that is purposeful, healing, and hopeful.

The Karrabing Film Collective uses the creation of film and art installations as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organization. The collective opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, KFC exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation.

Lina Ghotmeh is a humanist architect, born and raised in Beirut, and founder of a Paris-based practice that takes an in-depth, historical, and materially sensitive approach to its projects. Her Stone Garden apartment building in Beirut, Lebanon, designed in cement and earth gained global recognition when named Architecture Project of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2021. Completed shortly before the 2020 Beirut explosion, the building became a sort of symbol of resilience and the long history of the city by remaining mostly untouched.

Indian architect Anupama Kundoo’s work begins with and remains close to the deep human need to have purpose, refuge, and social engagement. It speaks through details; details that foster intimacy and variety, sensory and spatial. It is where makers engage with hand and mind to produce objects they are proud of, where they transform simple materials with care and intelligence into purposeful structures, where they are challenged to do more with less, and where they routinely exceed all expectations including their own.

The Anastas brothers founded Local Industries in 2012, as a community of bold artisans and designers dedicated to industrial furniture-making, and SCALES in 2016, as a research department that is constantly enhanced by linking scales that are usually opposed.
The duo works directly with factories and artisans to optimize the energy consumption in regards to the resources available and the ambition of the project. They believe that sustainability is no excuse for sacrifices. Instead, research is a synonym of ambition for a more sustainable, more comfortable, and more interactive design. Their most recent works include All Purpose, an installation for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale; the Hebron courthouse project; and Stone Matters – a research experiment into the possibilities of using stone in Palestine’s contemporary architecture. Elias and Yousef also co-founded Radio alHara – a community-based online radio station.

Thai architect and artist Boonserm Premthada, founder of Bangkok Project Studio, believes that architecture is the physical creation of an atmosphere that serves to heighten man’s awareness of his natural surroundings. His work isn’t about designing buildings, but rather the manipulation of light, shadow, wind, sound, and smell... creating an “poetics in architecture” that is a living being sense.

In his socially engaged work, Taiwanese architect and contractor Hsieh Ying-hun has been helping people rebuild their homes since the devastating earthquake in Taiwan 1999, when his reconstruction project for the Thao Tribe gained him international recognition.
Hsieh organized the reconstruction of housing and communities in disaster-struck areas while faced with two challenges: to build houses within an extremely tight budget and to base the projects on the notion of sustainable construction, green building, cultural preservation and creation of local employment opportunities.

Swiss architect Philippe Rahm runs his Paris-based studio based on a manifesto that looks “towards a meteorological architecture,” and asks og vapour, heat or light become the new bricks of contemporary construction? Rahm’s real-life explorations into applying this approach have resulted in projects like the Jade Eco Park in Taichung, Taiwan – a 70-hectare site where the climate is modulated in sections to create spaces that are less hot, less humid, and less polluted.

Based in Basel, Switzerland, Manuel Herz Architects is an architectural practice that is embedded in research, and is operating on a very wide range of typologies, locations and scales, from the architectural to the urban and territorial. Beyond the architectural scale, Manuel has been active in furniture and exhibition design, as well as in urban master planning and urban research. His projects have won numerous international design awards, have been exhibited in museums world wide, and acquired into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), amongst others. His office currently employs twelve people.

This historical structure, located in the center of Paris, was built for its main part in the end of the 18th century as the Halle au Ble. Then in the end of the 19th century it became the Bourse de Commerce by Henri Blondel’s renovation and conversion. Image courtesy of Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection. Image credit: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, NeM / Niney et Marca Architectes, Agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo by Patrick Tourneboeuf

Founded by Lesley Lokko and Sir David Adjaye OBE, the African Futures Institute wants to shift the axis of architectural innovation and influence away from the global North towards the global South, paying homage to the history of the Black Atlantic. The AFI provides a space that is simultaneously physical, digital and conceptual, underpinned by the desire to provoke and support new scholarship and new opportunities for radical African excellence. Image credit: Fred Swart, Graphic Design

Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse exposes the reader to a sprawling tale of capitalism and climate change told with excellent historical and cultural context. Amitav speaks in conversation with reknown curator Lucia Pietroiusti, the founder of the General Ecology project. Image: Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Design studio Formafantasma present the recent iteration of Cambio, an exhibition that offers insight into the way wood is sourced and used today. A collaboration with experts from the fields of science, conservation, engineering, policymaking and philosophy, the designers move from a microscopic analysis of wood and its ability to store carbon dioxide, to a metaphysical understanding of trees as living organisms. Image credit: Cambio, 2020 Still from video. Courtesy of Formafantasma

The First Wave is a new feature documentary film sharing exclusive access inside one of New York City’s hardest-hit hospital systems during the harrowing first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing Matthew Heineman’s signature approach of character-driven cinéma vérité, he and his team embeds with a group of doctors, nurses and patients on the frontlines as they face one of the greatest threats the world has ever encountered. Image credit: The First Wave, 2021. film still Courtesy of National Geographic

Mies van der Rohe’s refurbished Neue Nationalgalerie, a project led by David Chipperfield Architects Berlin between 2012 and 2021, has been shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2022. The project follows the idea of the ‘invisible architect’ where any updates or modifications were subservient to Mies’ original vision. Image credit: Simon Menge

We Are Opposite Like That is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary works that comprise mythologies for the poles, told from the non-human perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the ice. It beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of potential futures. Image credit: We Are Opposite Like That Courtesy of Himali Singh Soin

Winy Maas, one of the founders of MVRDV presents Depot Van Beuningen, the world’s first fully accessible art depot. The assignment was to offer a glimpse behind the scenes of the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam and make the whole art collection accessible to the public. Image credit: Ossip van Duivenbode

Top Manta is a collective of Senagalese former street vendors who, after learning how to fabricate “fakes” to sell on the streets of Barcelona, worked together to make their own designs. The group’s name comes from “mantero,” the common name for street vendors in the city. After opening their first clothing store in 2018, in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, they registered as a nonprofit organization, the Top Manta Cooperative, in 2020. Photo Courtesy of Top Manta

The Planet After Geoengineering employs a speculative fiction approach to think with and against geoengineering as a form of planetary management. The graphic novel makes climate engineering and its controversies visible in a series of five stories that are collectively assembled into a planetary section from the deep underground to outer space. Image credit: The Planet After Geoengineering, 2021. Courtesy of Design Earth

The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus is a series of Virtual Reality experiences and visual narratives designed to contest the active exclusion of Black and Brown formalisms and knowledge from the architectural canon. The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus attempts to uncover and reinstate the presence and power of those marginalized or demonized by the dominant conservative ethos of Ethiopian society while pushing up against the apocryphal stories of Africa. Image credit: Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus, VR Still. Courtesy of Miriam Hillawi Abraham

Decolonizing Architecture Art Research recently nominated the Dheisheh Refugee Camp to become a World Heritage site. Recognising the refugee as a subject in exile expands beyond narratives of displacement and suffering. With their work architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti aim for architecture to be mobilized as an agent of political transformation. Image credit: Refugee Heritage Book Cover Design by: Matthew Ashton and Mauro Bubbico with assistance from Fabio Bacchini, Giacomo Dal Prà, Alessandro Latela, Luca Longobardi

Forest Mind unites diverse strands of knowledge on the intelligence of plants, on plant-human relationships, and the role of seeing and observing in video making as a vital part of world-making. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, this idea takes a biocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature. Image credit: Tree of Life from Forest Mind installation, courtesy of Ursula Biemann

Argentine photographer Sebastián López Brach also received a COVID-19 Emergency Fund grant from National Geographic to work on the impact of the pandemic and the historical descent of the Paraná River, recording the stories of families living in the Paraná Delta.Through different family stories in the wetlands of the Paraná River, Lopez Brach documents how they adapt to the changes imposed by the pandemic and environmental transformations. Image credit: Sebastián López Brach

Artist Amie Siegel’s Asterisms explores geological and social displacement on a planetary scale, focusing on the United Arab Emirates. Gold factories, oil recovery, migrant labor, desertification, artificial islands and Arabian horses trained for show connect in the superposition of varied projection formats. Amie Siegel, Asterisms, 2021, 4K multi-channel video installation, color/sound. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery.

Monument Lab’s research team spent a year scouring almost a half million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. The National Monument Audit allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped the USA's monument landscape, to pose questions about common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory. Image courtesy of Monument Lab

The project City of 1,000 Tanks was developed as part of the Water as Leverage for Resilient Cities Asia programme to identify the interrelationships between the underlying causes of floods, water scarcity and pollution in Chennai and offers a holistic solution to these three problems. Image courtesy of City of 1000 Tanks

Based on over a decade of eco-cultural cooperation in Tierra del Fuego, Turba Tol Hol Hol Tol is born from the work of Camila Marambio and proposes that the Chilean pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale can create a growing community oriented towards the conservation of peatlands. Their conservation is intrinsically linked to the future wellbeing of humankind and, in Patagonia, to the rebirth of the Selk'nam people.

During the Brazilian military regime, the Xavante people were subjected to a brutal campaign of forced removals to open space for plantation farms. This project by Paulo Tavares traces the archaeology of the ancient villages from which they have been displaced. Can we claim trees, vines and palms to be historic monuments? Image courtesy of Paulo Tavares in collaboration with Bö’u Xavante Association.

Nestled in a mountainous valley near Beijing, The Chapel of Sound is a monolithic open-air concert hall with views to the ruins of the Ming Dynasty-era Great Wall. While designed to capture the unfamiliar and deeply touching experience of music performed in the cradle of nature, the architects also wanted people just to calm down and listen to the sound of nature, which they believe is profoundly inspiring and healing.

ProxyAddress is a system that allows those faced with homelessness to avoid being severed from support the moment they lose an address.
If a person is made homeless they lose their address, a crucial piece of information required to register for a bank account or apply for a job.

Limbo Accra is a fresh-thinking, architecture infused spatial design studio, offering a large and flexible outlet for experimentation in public art, design and architectural production. Much of our work emerges from research and interdisciplinary design projects, rooted in the experimentation with the aesthetic and cultural significance of unfinished, decayed concrete structures in West African cities.

Holly Jean Buck is a geographer and environmental social scientist studying how emerging technologies can help build a regenerative society. Currently, her research focuses on what it will take socially and politically to put carbon back underground. She is the author of After Geoengineering (Verso, 2019), which explores best-case scenarios for climate intervention, and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough (Verso, 2021), on how to execute a planned ending for fossil fuels.

Carolina Caycedo is a prominent multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory, as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities. David de Rozas is a multidisciplinary artist, award-winning filmmaker, and educator. His practice merges experimental documentary and contemporary art forms, revisiting and relocating the politics of memory within the tensions of colonization and decolonization.

Elizabeth Hoover is an associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley whose research, life, and community work focuses on food sovereignty and environmental justice for Native American communities. Based on collaborations with tribal communities across the US, Hoover has published books and articles about Native American food sovereignty and seed rematriation; environmental reproductive justice in Native American communities; and tribal citizen science and community based participatory research.

Renee Kemp-Rotan, CEO studiorotan, is an urban designer and master planner. She is the first African American woman to graduate Syracuse University, B. Architecture. Presently, Kemp-Rotan is working with MOVE CDC, the community, AIA, and NOMA to develop The Africatown International Design Idea Competition in Mobile, Alabama, the only settlement in America built by Africans at the site of the last African slave cargo ship.

Joseph Kunkel, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, is a Principal at MASS Design Group, where he directs the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab. He is a community designer and educator, focused on sustainable development practices throughout Indian Country. His professional career has centered on community-based design, material research, fabrication, and construction. In 2019 Kunkel was awarded an Obama Fellowship for his work with Indigenous communities.

Simon Denny makes exhibitions that unpack the social and political implications of the technology industry and the rise of social media, startup culture, blockchains and cryptocurrencies. He co-founded the artist mentoring program Berlin Program for Artists and serves as Professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a scholar and writer who works at the intersections of art, environment, feminist-cuir politics, and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of four books, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), and Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010, with Herman Gray). She is completing a new book on what she terms the colonial Anthropocene, At the Sea’s Edge: Liquidity Beyond Colonial Extinction (Forthcoming Duke University Press 2022).

Dani Admiss is an independent Iranian-English curator and researcher based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her projects operate across the interlinking fields of art, design, science and technology. She is interested in the social and material entanglements that surface from extensively mapping worlds and her projects explore curating as a collective storytelling practice, imagined and pursued. She runs Dark Conservation, a long-term curatorial research project that rethinks the role of ecological conservation practices in expanded contexts and is the founder of Playbour, a co-creation platform on digital labour and has worked on various curatorial projects and exhibitions in the UK and internationally.

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. As part of In Focus we share a film made by the studio of their visit to Salar de Uyuni, home to over half of the world’s reserves of Lithium.

Jaida Grey Eagle is an Oglala Lakota artist, born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jaida is a photographer, producer, beadwork artist and writer. ... Jaida is the co-producer of the Sisters Rising Documentary and is passionate about bringing awareness of Indigenous issues.

Elsa Hoover is an architectural designer and writer from Minneapolis whose work focuses on borders, living environments, and Indigenous futures. Her recent work includes cartographic illustration and an immersive theater installation. Her work has been featured in The Avery Review, The Funambulist, and elsewhere. She received a degree in architecture from Columbia University and studies architecture at the Harvard GSD. Elsa works as an editor-at-large with the Avery Review and as a design researcher with MASS Design Group in Boston/Santa Fe.

Ryūe Nishizawa is one of the most important and influential architects working in Japan today. Founder of Office of Ryue Nishizawa and co-founder of SANAA. SANAA is often said to work with a ‘fourth dimension’ in their design of space, and Nishizawa's solo work takes this position to engineering and spatial extremes. Nishizawa will present his recent single-family house on the coast of Chile. Photo credit: Cristobal Palma

Born and raised in Mexico City, director Fernando Frías will present his award-winning film, Ya No Estoy Aquí that is set in the mountains of Monterrey, one of the northernmost cities in Mexico. The film follows Kolombias, a distinctive urban tribe from the violence-plagued regions of the country that once created a countercultural movement around their love for old-fashioned cumbia music. Photo credit: Fernando Frías

Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and the author of critically acclaimed books on design, including Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design as an Attitude. Alice is a co-founder, with Paola Antonelli, of the Design Emergency project to investigate design's response to the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath. Photo credit: Michael Leckie

Cave_Bureau was founded in 2014 in Nairobi by Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi who steer a diverse range of projects and research studies on the African continent. The bureau of architects and researchers charting explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. Their work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city as a means to confront the challenges of our contemporary rural and urban lives. Image credit: Cave_Bureau

Sir David Adjaye OBE is an award-winning Ghanaian-British architect known to infuse his artistic sensibilities and ethos for community-driven projects. His ingenious use of materials, bespoke designs and visionary sensibilities have set him apart as one of the leading architects of his generation. Sir David will be giving a remote tour of an expansive new project currently under construction in Florida. Photo credit: Adjaye Associates

Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. They will be sharing their spectacular new home and studio, Ca'n Terra. Photo credit: Iwan Baan

BlackSpace is an interdisciplinary collective seeking to bridge policy, people, and place, with a mission of equity and justice. Since meeting in 2015, the collective has been working to nurture and support Black people in fields of influence that shape our social and spatial environments while also working to support heritage conservation in Black and marginalized communities. As professionals trained in architecture, urban planning, and design, their work has also involved unlearning traditional modes of urbanism that exclude marginalized voices and creating new modes of work that center equity. To that end, BlackSpace has created a working manifesto to help guide our work as urbanists working in and with communities.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces is an Oakland-based architecture and real estate development non-profit co-founded by Deanna Van Buren working to end mass incarceration by building infrastructure that addresses its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. Their work counters the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture of justice—courthouses, prisons, and jails—by creating spaces and buildings for restorative justice, community building, and housing for people coming out of incarceration. Photo credit: Courtesy of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces.

For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. It works with artists and organizations to center the voices of artists in public discourse, expand what participation in a democracy looks like, and reshape conversations about politics. Photo credit: Jeff Vespa

In collaboration with Stockholm-based museum ArkDes, Sámi architect and Indigenous artist Joar Nango presents a digital manifestation of the Sámi Architecture Library. Nango's work investigates the nomadic conception of space, territories, and ideas around the concept of home, focusing on different ways of dealing with materiality, movement and space. Photo credit: Joar Nango, Girjegumpi installed in Jokkmokk during the annual winter-market in February, 2018. Photo: Astrid Fadnes

In collaboration with Stockholm-based museum ArkDes, chief curator Carlos Mínguez Carrasco presents the museum's recent exhibition Kiruna Forever.

In collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, Liam Young will present his latest short film, Planet City that imagines what a city that contains all the world's human inhabitants would look like. Image credit: Planet City (2020), Directed by Liam Young. Pictured here is the High Altitude Bot Herder. Costume Direction Ane Crabtree, Costume Artist Aneesa Shami, Mask Artist Liam Young. Modelled by David Freeland Jr. Photography by Direly S

Alia Farid is an artist who lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. She is the curator of The Space Between Classrooms, a forthcoming exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York. Image: Marco Abarca
Ve!, 2020 Process drawing for digital platform entitled The Axis of Modern Violence Reminds (Gender Based Violence in PR Highschools), a violence landscape visualization with an overlay of a survey created by Olga Casellas and Marco Abarca on the occasion of The Space Between Classrooms
Courtesy of artist

waiwai is a Dubai-based studio formed of architects Wael Al Awar and Kenichi Teramoto. Through scientific experimentation and research, the architects are attempting to create a technological equivalent of Portland cement from the crystalized salt and minerals that form the UAE’s unique Sabkha. The project will form the UAE representation at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo credit: Al Rowais & Jebel Ali

NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators of color through education and access founded by Titus Kaphar, Jason Price, and Jonathan Brand and designed by Deborah Berke Partners. Through intergenerational mentorship, professional development and cross-sector collaboration, NXTHVN accelerates professional careers in the arts. Image credit: Deborah Berke Partners

Led by Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg, SO—IL is an award-winning architectural design firm that envisions spaces for culture, learning and innovation. In conversation with Philip Tinari, director of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art SO—IL will present recent and under construction work in Shanghai and New York.

Abuelita is an animation production company located in the Delta, Tigre (Argentina), specialized in projects with social and environmental themes. The goal of El Futuro Imposible/The Impossible Future is to build an optimist vision of our future based on the most important ideas and movements of today. Photo credit: Abuelita

Francis Kéré is regarded as one of the world's most distinguished contemporary architects thanks to his pioneering of a communal approach to design and his commitment to sustainable materials as well as modes of construction. Inspired by a curiosity for the particularities of any given locality and its social tapestry, he has gathered a diverse, agile team at his Berlin-based Kéré Architecture office, to take on projects across four continents.

Feral Atlas, a fascinating online experience created by the anthropologists Anna Tsing, (author of The Mushroom at the End of the World), Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, offers an original and playful approach to studying the Anthropocene. Focused on the world's feral reactions to human intervention, the editors explore the structures and qualities that lie at the heart of the feral and make the phenomenon possible.

Mariana Ordóñez Grajales, founder of Comunal, photographer Onnis Luque and Indignación A.C., will present a collaborative reflection between the research project "TYPOLOGIES. Current state of traditional housing in Mexico" and the human right to habitat and self-determination.
Photo credit: Onnis Luque

Sumayya Vally is the founder and principal of Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based design studio. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identity and contested territory. She uses Johannesburg as a laboratory for finding speculative histories, future archaeologies, and design languages; often with the intent to reveal the invisible. She is the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus

The World Around is made possible by our global partner, Facebook Open Arts.

The World Around's official partner is Arper.

The World Around is proud to be in residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2021.

Studio Ossidiana is a practice based in Rotterdam that works at the intersection of architecture, visual arts and design, led by Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti. They will be in conversation with Dr Mariana Pestana, the chief curator of the 2020 Istanbul Design Biennial, ‘Empathy Revisited’. Dr Pestana is an idependent curator interested in critical social practice and the role of fiction in design for an age marked by technological progress and an ecological crisis.

Curator and educator Sepake Angiama, artistic director of Inava, and curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale will be in conversation with French experience designer, director and founder of the University of the Underground, Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun. An award-winning director and experience designer, Dr Ben Hayoun is Designer of Experiences at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the world through food. They will be in discussion with architecture writer and curator Maite Borjbad of the Art Institute of Chicago to discuss the way in which their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.

Professor Harriet Harris is dean of architecture at Pratt University, Brooklyn as well as an architect and activist and feminist. Dr Harriss will be in conversation with celebrated philosopher professor Timothy Morton, whose academic interests include literature and the environment, ecotheory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory, food studies and much more.

Thomas Thwaites calls himself "a designer (of a more speculative sort)." His thoughtful projects look deeply at the science behind technology, as in the Toaster Project, which sent spiralling him into the history and techniques of metallurgy and ‘Goatman’, his attempt to escape the world of humanity to become a goat. Thomas will be talking about his work with Shanghai-based design curator and critic Aric Chen, former lead curator of architecture and design at M+ and curatorial director of Design Miami.

Curator and director of Haus der Kunst, Andrea Lissoni will be in conversation with filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Working in the space between cinema and contemporary art, and originally trained as an architect, Weerasethakul creates installations, videos, short and feature films that are often non-linear and transmit a strong sense of dislocation and otherworldliness.

Kunlé Adeyemi is a Nigerian architect, urbanist and creative researcher. Adeyemi is founder and principal of NLÉ, an architecture, design and urbanism practice, based in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Adeyemi was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2018 and has been widely recognised for his project Makoko Floating School, a prototype floating structure, built for the historic water community of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria.

Andrés Jaque is director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In 2003 he founded the Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLIN), bringing a transectional approach to architectural design; practicing architecture as the intervention on complex composites of relationships, where its agency is negotiated with the agency unfold by other entities. For this project for Earth Day, Jaque collaborates with Ivan L. Munuera, a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. Since 2015 he is developing his dissertation on the architecture of HIV/AIDS at Princeton University.

Walter Hood is a landscape and public artist creating urban spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of current residents while also honoring communal histories. Hood melds architectural and fine arts expertise with a commitment to designing ecologically sustainable public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Over his career, he has transformed traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses into spaces that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods.

Cameron is a trained architect and community leader with 20+ years experience creating and implementing community development programs, educational programs, post-disaster and post-conflict reconstruction and social impact initiatives. Having worked in 58 countries and developed shelter solutions to over two million people his recent activities have included building schools for 4500 refugee children in Jordan, mobile COVID19 health centers and advising on cultural sustainability and preservation projects in Japan and South Africa.

Kalyanee Mam is an award-winning filmmaker whose work is focused on art and advocacy. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. Her debut documentary feature, A River Changes Course, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. She has directed the award-winning shorts Lost World and The Fight for Areng Valley and is currently working on a new feature documentary, The Fire and the Bird’s Nest.

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Williams’ creative practice employs color as a way to draw attention to the complexities of race, place and value in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most inner cities. Williams’ installations, paintings and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and in the process, raise questions about the state of urban space and citizenship in America.

Curator and writer Carson Chan will be reflecting with Design Earth, a collaborative practice led by El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn. The office’s work engages the geographic to open up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.

Karen van Godtsenhoven, associate curator of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be speaking with Parisian designer Mats Rombaut about radical sustainability in the fashion industry. Rombaut is a multi-disciplinary creative currently based in Paris and founder of ROMBAUT, a vegan accessory brand with sustainability at its core.

Mona Chalabi is a data journalist who lives in New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The Guardian and many more. She is also an illustrator whose work has been commended by the Royal Statistical Society. Her work has been exhibited at several galleries including the Tate, The Design Museum and the House of Illustration.

junya.ishigami+associates is one of the most exciting studios in architecture today. Established by Junya Ishigami in2004, the firm gained international recognition following the competition of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology's KAIT Workshop in 2007. The office was awarded Golden Lion for Best Project of the 12th Biennale in 2010 and just opened the Serpentine Pavilion. Image: Junya Ishigami, Botanical Farm Garden Art Biotop, 2018. Photo by junya.ishigami+associates.

Founded in Barcelona in 2004 by Alberto Veiga and Fabrizio Barozzi, this impressive young office was awarded Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture in 2015 for their Szczecin Philharmonic building, as well as RIBA Award for International Excellence for the FIne art Museum in Chur. Barozzi Veiga will present the latest new project, the Zürich Tanzhaus, completed in 2019. Image: Barozzi Veiga, Tanzhaus Zürich, 2019. Photo by Simon Menges.

Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of Beijing-based studio DnA _Design and Architecture. She has been recognised internationally for her work and was recently awarded the 2019 Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architect. She will be presenting her studio’s extensive recent work in the revitalising process of two rural regions in China, Songyang and Zhejiang Province, an extensive process involving different heritage and regions. Image: Xu Tiantian, DnA, The Songyang Story, 2019. Photo by Wang Ziling.

Emmanuel Pratt was awarded the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant in 2019. He is an urban designer creating a model of resident-driven community development in neighborhoods that have suffered the effects of long-term disinvestment. Pratt is co-founder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation (SWF), a nonprofit organization based on Chicago’s South Side that engages local residents in the cultivation and regeneration of social, environmental, and economic resources in their neighborhoods. Image: Emmanuel Pratt, Sweet Water Foundation. Photo courtesy John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Writer, journalist and campaigner Caroline Criado Perez is the author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Invisible Women reveals the systematic, and often unconscious bias behind the data and assumptions that construct our everyday life. She examines a world built for men and in particular the increasing reliance in all areas on algorithms which are usually designed by, and using large amounts of data on, men which affects everything from internet search results to job applications. Image: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women, 2019.

David OReilly is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. He is the creator of the interactive experience and reality simulation game 'Everything'. Part game, part philosophical experiment, ‘Everything’ allows players to assume the role of almost anything in the universe, from bacteria and to bear, starlings and molecules. The work offers a way to experience our reality as a phenomenon of interdependent systems that can all perceive, think and interact differently while being driven by the same underlying rules. Image: David OReilly, Everything, 2017.

Guess what this century’s most valuable resource is? It’s you—and all your online behaviours, enriched data sets and millions of meta-data points. Writer, thinker and cultural critic Shumon Basar presents Age of You, an exhibition about what it means to be an individual today. Curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with graphic design by Daly & Lyon, it includes over 70 visual contributors from the worlds of art, design, filmmaking, photography, performance and electronic music. Image: Shumon Basar, The Age of You, 2019.

One of the most influential curators in the design world, Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator of Architecture & Design at The Museum of Modern Art, as well as MoMA’s founding Director of Research & Development. Her expansive and investigative approach to curating combines design, architecture, art, science and technology. She will be presenting her 2019 exhibition Broken Nature shown at the XXII Triennale di Milano. Image: Paola Antonelli, Broken Nature, 2019. Photo by Gianluca Di Ioia.

Best of Luck with the Wall is a documentary short by US digital artist Josh Begley. The film observes in striking detail of the changing geography and geometries and the expansive, complex landscape that comprises the 2,000-mile long US-Mexico border. The film was made by cutting and collages over 200,000 satellite images downloaded from Google Maps. Image: Josh Begley, Best of Luck with the Wall, 2016.

One of the most prominent names in design today, Canadian-born Bruce Mau has written and/or designed more than 200 books, including the landmark S,M,L,XL, a seminal collaboration with Rem Koolhaas. His life’s work is dedicated to applying the power of design to transforming the world. His new book, MC24 - The principles for Designing Massive Change in your Life and Work will be published by Phaidon in 2020.

Nick Axel is an editor, architect, educator and theorist. Head of the Architectural Design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the deputy editor of e-flux architecture, Nick is positioned to be taking part in all the most relevant conversations in architecture today. In a new editorial project for e-flux ‘Are Friends Electric’, the publication asks: “at moment when we can no longer imagine a world without technology, it is vital to ask how we—the human inhabitants of this planet—imagine the world and its technologies?”

Living and working in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama engages in the formation of architectural spaces inspired by the promise and failure of modernity. His installations often use material cues such as worn jute sacks to draw narratives of labour and movement of goods. His work has been shown at 56, 57 and 58 Venice Biennale and documenta14. Image: Ibrahim Mahama, A Friend, 2019.

Based in Santiago, Chile, architect Cecilia Puga has run her practice since 1995. She has undertaken various scales of design projects from her iconic single family houses to social community work and urban planning. She will be presenting the years-long restoration and transformation of the historic 19th century Palacio Pereira into public library and exhibition halls.

Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop is an architect and curator working at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) as Head of Architectural Affairs, where she is responsible for overseeing the planning and implementation of cultural institutions, museums and exhibitions. Since 2015, she heads the ‘Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy’, which received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the 2019 cycle as part of the Muharraq Revitalization Project. Image: Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop, Muharraq Revitalisation Project, Pearling Path Visitor's Centre, Valerio Oligiati, 2019. Photo by Archive Olgiati.

Something & Son explores social and environmental issues via everyday scenarios criss-crossing the boundaries between the visual arts, architecture and activism. They create permanent installations, functional sculptures and spaces for public performance that build communities, create new ecologies and force a reappraisal and understanding of some of the biggest social and environmental issues of our time. The Manuals is their latest long-term project that explores a new culture where humans create rather destroy ecosystems through our everyday actions and infrastructure. Image: Something & Son, The Manuals, 2019.

Eva Franch i Gilabert is the first female director of Architectural Association (AA) in London. She will be presenting Architecture in Translation, a project that launched this year with the goal of building a multilingual and multicultural approach to architecture today. As a school with more than 81 nationalities, where more than 40 languages are spoken, the project seeks to recognise the value of language in the production of space and ideas. Image: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Architecture in Translation, 2019. Art Direction, Pentagram.

Elizabeth Diller is a co-founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). Alongside co-founder Ricardo Scofidio, Liz’s cross-genre work has been distinguished with TIME’s "100 Most Influential People" list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship awarded in the field of architecture. Catherine Ince is Chief Curator of V&A East, a new two-site museum and collection research centre due to open in London’s Olympic Park in 2023. The pair will discuss their respective work at the forefront of new critical institutional practice. Image: V&A East. Photo by Diller Scofidio + Renfo, 2018.

Shohei Shigematsu is a Partner at OMA based in its New York office, an has lead the firm’s diverse portfolio in the Americas for the past decade. Shohei will discuss his engagements within the art world to focus on the changing demands and needs of cultural institutions of different typologies including two forthcoming museum expansion projects, the Albright Knox Art Gallery and the New Museum. Image: Shohei Shigematsu, OMA, New Museum alongside its expansion. Photo courtesy OMA.

For Extinct in New York, an exhibition on Governors Island with the Swiss Institute, artist Michael Wang researched native plant, lichen, and algae species native to NY but which no longer grow naturally in any of the five boroughs. He installed four bespoke greenhouses containing a selection of these organisms and trained a team of caretakers to maintain them. The plants were then reintroduced into parks and gardens in New York City. Image: Michael Wang, Platanthera Ciliaris, 2019.

Designer, academic and author Julia Watson is a leading expert on indigenous technologies, as seen in her monograph Lo—TEK Design by Radical Indigenism, a global exploration of indigenous architectural innovations. Lo—TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. Watson will share this compelling new research arguing that it is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.

Liam Young is an Australian born film director and architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. The music video Choreographic Camouflage takes place in a near future city that sees everything through sensors and scanners. An underground community has developed strategies to disappear to the eyes of technology. In collaboration with choreographer Jacob Jonas, a new vocabulary of movement has been designed to disguise their bodies from detection algorithms used by the city’s control networks. The animated film prototypes a sub-cultural movement that may soon emerge in response to imminent smart city technologies. Image: Still from Where the City Can’t See: Choreographic Camouflage.

Featuring a selection of vanguard and diverse publications from around the globe including books, magazines and self-published materials specially selected for The World Around visitors, the Head Hi Book Kiosk will be a hub for inspiration and reference. With many of the titles featuring the day's participants, Head Hi welcomes all attendees to learn more about the conference’s key themes. Visitors can purchase the publications or enjoy browsing the selection. Head Hi is a book and coffee shop run by one of The World Around's founding members Alexandra Hodkowski, located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard.