Everyone in the creative industries is "wondering what our role is" says Beatrice Galilee

Beatrice Galilee has curated an online design symposium for Virtual Design Festival, which will be broadcast from 1:00pm UK time later today. In this video message, she questions the role of the creative industries during the coronavirus pandemic.

Galilee is a co-founder and curator of The World Around, an architecture and design conference, which had its first edition in January 2020 in New York.

Galilee has curated a series of interviews with architects and visionaries working on environmental issues around the world in a symposium for Earth Day, which will be broadcast live on Dezeen from 1:00pm today as part of a collaboration between Virtual Design Festival and The World Around.

"Like everybody working in the creative industries now, I'm wondering what to say and what our role is and what we can learn from these extremely complicated times that we're all sharing together," Galilee said in the video.

"Those are some of the questions I'm asking the best people I know in the design industries on 22 April here on Dezeen, when The World Around is going to take over the website for Earth Day."

Tribute to essential workers

Speaking from her home in Brooklyn, New York, Galilee also paid tribute to the essential workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic in her video message.

"I'm extremely lucky and grateful to be safe and comfortable in quarantine, and very aware that's not the case for everybody, and so thankful to everybody who's on the frontlines at the moment, keeping us all safe and fed and healthy," she said.

Galilee's video message features in Dezeen's launch movie for Virtual Design Festival, along with video messages from 34 other architects, designers and artists in lockdown around the world, including Stefano Giovanni, Es Devlin, Ini Archibong, Ben van Berkel and Bec Brittain. You can watch the full movie here.

Galilee is a writer, curator and former curator for architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where she organised its architecture symposium A Year of Architecture in a Day

Send us a video message

Dezeen invited architects, designers, artists and industry figures to record video messages from lockdown and made a montage of 35 video messages to launch Virtual Design Festival.

We'll be posting an individual video message each day. Check them out here. To submit your own message, see the brief here.

About Virtual Design Festival

Virtual Design Festival runs from 15 April to 30 June 2020. It intends to bring the architecture and design world together to celebrate the culture and commerce of our industry, and explore how it can adapt and respond to extraordinary circumstances.

We will host a rolling programme of online talks, lectures, movies, product launches and more. It will complement and support fairs and festivals around the world that have had to be postponed or cancelled and it will provide a platform for design businesses, so they can, in turn, support their supply chains.

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