‘It's about how it feels in the space’: Beatrice Galilee on her time at the Met, coronavirus and curation, and what movements she wants to see creatives get behind

Pi Media’s Daniel Langstaff interviews Beatrice Galilee, top curator and creative, on her process, past, and what she thinks about the future.

Source: Beatrice Galilee

It’s almost dark in London, but when Beatrice Galilee joins our Zoom call she’s brightly lit by the New York sun. She’s currently in Brooklyn, having moved there in 2014 to take on the flagship position of Daniel Brodsky associate curator of Architecture and Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, staying for five years before leaving to start her own initiative “The World Around.” Before moving, she had graduated from the Bartlett – UCL’s architecture faculty – and worked from London, starting her own exhibition space, and then going on to curate at biennales in China, Hong Kong and Lisbon. 

Beatrice was the first curator of her kind at the Met; the role was introduced in 2014 and she was the first candidate to take it on. During her time there, she initiated the Year of Architecture in a Day symposium, highlighting important projects undertaken or completed in the 12 months prior to the event. “I started it because I wasn’t really able to find the ‘way’ to do an exhibition – I kept proposing exhibitions and they weren't quite right, or I was working on too many different things at the same time” she says. As she talks through the event there’s a clear emphasis on its efficiency and affordability; in an institution as huge as the Met, a single exhibition can take “five to seven years” to organise and run, so she wanted to find a way of doing something quick and impactful. A Year of Architecture in a Day ran for three years (2016 to 2019) during Beatrice’s tenure at the museum, garnering more media and public attention each time it occurred. “My big contribution to the museum ended up not being an exhibition as such, but this more ephemeral thing” she says, smiling.

“It’s not something that you can just intellectually decide on paper and write down, you really have to be able to sense it.”

As the conversation develops, Beatrice’s tactile relationship to curation becomes apparent. She speaks of her time in architecture school – starting with her undergrad at Bath – where she organised numerous events through societies, and how this gave her a “hands-on relationship to understanding the processes and production values.” While doing a part-time Masters in Architectural History at UCL she travelled the world and, working as editor of ICON magazine and curator for various international events and exhibitions, enacted what she was learning on her course in real-time. This “parallel knowledge” gave her an incredibly unique perspective on the world of curation, something she still maintains as one of her strengths to this day. 

“I think that what we’re finding out is that people are fine about consuming online … but you have to make something that makes sense in that medium.”

When asked what’s prioritised when setting up an exhibition, she references how her spatial understanding directly guides her work; “first and foremost it’s about how it feels in the space, and then that's how you get into the entrance of storytelling, and how you draw people in.” Similar to the way that architects often draw up plans but then go back to their site and have to re-jig the drawings because they just don’t feel “right,” Beatrice states “It's not something that you can just intellectually decide on paper and write down, you really have to be able to sense it.”

When Beatrice left the Met in 2019 she took the idea for A Year of Architecture in a Day with her, albeit in a slightly different form – The World Around initiative. It started as an in-person event, with the first public gathering taking place in 2020, but with coronavirus developing it quickly became apparent that these could not continue, at least for the imminent future. Beatrice then gracefully moved the entire operation online, where it continues now. “I think that what we're finding out is that people are fine about consuming online … but you have to make something that makes sense in that medium,” she says, speaking about the challenges and opportunities this digital shift poses. The original intent was to record the in-person talks and archive them online (similar to a TED-Talk), but there was a realisation that “you don’t really need to have an event in order to make the films.” The World Around’s website now hosts interviews with architects and creatives from across the globe and possibly allows for even more intimacy than in-person events; some architects tour their buildings while talking about them, running their hands along the walls and navigating the spaces that they designed themselves.

“There’s a focus on respecting rural and indigenous traditions of building … the local building materials, the local ways of life, the local ways of dealing with flooding, the local ways of dealing with climate change – there are answers in those communities.”

Despite this, there is still an evident hunger to organise events outside of the pandemic: “I do still believe in in-person events and that energy of everyone in the room at the same time; the buzz, the networking, the chemistry … Agh, I wish we had that,” she says, smiling at the prospect of these events that currently seem so foreign. Coronavirus has, to an extent, reshaped how people interact with curated events, and Beatrice believes that this will be maintained into the future: “I feel like we'll have exhibitions that are must-see in person, and then events that are brilliant and make total sense online, but would never make sense offline.”

This year while organising and enacting The World Around, something that stood out for Beatrice was an interest in returning to vernacular architecture and specific materials and techniques that are appropriate for use in given places. She mentions the afro-futurist works of Francis Kéré, a Burkinabé architect, as a stellar example of how “listening [to] and learning [from]” local practices and techniques can deeply enrich architecture. She appears to feel strongly about this, speaking assuredly: “There’s a focus on respecting rural and indigenous traditions of building and there’s so much to learn from, for example, First Nations communities in America … the local building materials, the local ways of life, the local ways of dealing with flooding, the local ways of dealing with climate change – there are answers in those communities.” 

I finish by asking what advice she can give to current university students. To this, she replies: “Keep in mind that there’s probably something that you absolutely love doing, and that's the thing you should listen to the most. I organised events because I felt like I could, and I co-opted people, and got my professors to give permission slips, and arranged my own exhibitions. If you find a way to do what you're good at, you will succeed.”

Beatrice’s book “Radical Architecture of the Future” is now available for pre-order.