Name: Dialogue Through Art
Uploaded: 2025-05-21
Duration: 4 min 48 s
Description: The creator of large collaborative art installations at world-renowned arts festivals will share details on her latest work, “Power Prism,” a special commission for Fortune MPW, designed to showcase how different generational perspectives refract and strengthen leadership.

The creator of large collaborative art installations at world-renowned arts festivals will share details on her latest work, “Power Prism,” a special commission for Fortune MPW, designed to showcase how different generational perspectives refract and strengthen leadership. 

Dialogue Through Art

Conferences

All right, now I would like to introduce Caroline Ghon, an experienced architect who in 2024 designed the Temple of Together, the largest ever installation at Burning Man, the world renowned arts festival held annually in the Nevada desert. Ghon is with us here in Rio. and she's created a special installation for Fortune titled Power Prism. Hopefully you saw it outside, celebrates connection and dialogue across different perspectives and different generations. To hear more about the purpose of this installation and the meaning behind it, please welcome Caroline to the states. Hello, hello. OK, so, um, you are in addition to all of the things I just said and we wanna hear more about experience architecture, but you're also an entrepreneur, so just give us like real quick your career trajectory, your journey. Well how do you connect the dots here? So I started out in my career at McKenzie and Company and then I started my first business when I was in my early twenties in New York. It was called Levo and it was a professional network that. Focused on the development and community between women in the 1st 10 years of their career, and we went from 0 to over 10 million members in a matter of a few years so it's this incredible experience of creating community and finding this symbiotic relationship between mentees and mentors that informs a lot of my work today. OK, so now I can, I can connect the dots. OK, it makes sense in my head. So tell us a bit about the installation, what the meaning is, and how can. Women in this room engaged with it. Well, I'm so excited to introduce Power Prism to all of you and to officially open it with this conversation, so thank you. So as you may have observed when you came in, there's a prismatic structure in the entrance, and it's called Power Prism. So it's a piece I designed specifically for Fortune MPW and it's about the wisdom that's exchanged between generations of women. So the structures represent all of. Generations of women interacting with each other and the prismatic film represents the way in which when you basically reflect your story you refract your wisdom and you don't know how the story you share is going to impact someone's life. You may not even see them 15 years later when they still remember the thing that you said to them. And so our encouragement is to use our time here today to share our stories and influence this next generation of leaders. So I Be outside and I would invite you to participate. You'll be able to draw a card, so draw your fortune at fortune and answer that question directly on the sculpture, and then we're going to take all of that information and with the help of AI create a very dynamic personalized basically map of the wisdom that we have in this room. So we're really looking forward to your participation. So one thing, yeah, yeah, and please, please. Anticipate um one thing I didn't mention when I talked about your Burning Man installation is that the whole thing with Burning Man is that you burn it after um please nobody burned this one that's not the intent it's not part of the plan but, but talk a little bit about, you know, as uh as an artist, as an architect, um, what is that like first of all to create something that is meant to be destroyed and how do you approach work differently when it's not. Yes, I love this question so much. So I had the opportunity last year to work on the temple, and it was 10 months, the process of 10 months of preparation and actually only 19 days in the desert, in high desert to assemble it with over 1000 volunteers and then open it up to over 75,000 people to interact with it and make it their own. And I burned it, so the artist is the one who sets fire to it. So it was an incredible experience of letting go, but what it taught me was two things the Importance of human connection. The messages that were written inside of that piece were so consistent. They were about finding your authentic self and connecting with others in community and the importance of that. And then number 2, in the process of creating something so um intense and beautiful and then actually letting it go, I reflected on the nature of life. Someone came to me and said, How can you spend nearly a year of your life making something that's meaningful to you in community and then knowing that it's it's gonna go back. To the ashes, and I paused and I said, Well, how is that any different than our journey here just on a different time scale. So it's given me the opportunity to reflect on life and what I love about Power Prism is that in a way it's also ephemeral. We're only here for 2 days, but there's also this continuity that we hope to bring into the digital space to experiment with those two things together. Caroline, thank you so much and again I encourage everybody to engage with the installation so we can learn from each other. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. See you out there.