Es Devlin Stages 700 Craft Masterworks at Venice's Homo Faber

Es Devlin, the British artist and scenographer behind the London Olympics closing ceremony, arena tours for Jay-Z and the Weeknd, and the Royal Opera House's staging of Berlioz's "Les Troyens," has designed the narrative backdrop for some 700 objects by 500 artisans from 70 countries at this year's Homo Faber Biennial in Venice.

The monthlong exhibition opened at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, a cultural center on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore — an island, as The New York Times notes, roughly the size of a sports stadium. The setting seems an unlikely match for a designer who routinely works at colossal scale. Yet Devlin, 55, also has intimacy in her toolkit, the paper reports.

Homo Faber — Latin for "man the maker" — is the name adopted by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, a Geneva-based nonprofit established in 2016 by the Italian writer Franco Cologni to promote master craftsmanship. The biennial brings a selection of supreme achievements in craft to Venice every two years, as if, in the Times's phrasing, to remind a heedless postindustrial world of their existence.

Within the interlocking spaces of the Cini Foundation's Palladio-designed monastery, its adjoining gardens and maze, Devlin has devised a route of enchanted, room-scale episodes. The works on view — often sophisticated objects made from mundane materials — are staged among mirrors, silhouettes and tableaus resembling Geppetto's workshop. A community swimming pool has been transformed into a mythical lake.

The approach echoes Devlin's 2025 installation "Library of Light" in Milan, which drew nearly 200,000 visitors to the Pinacoteca di Brera. There, as in Venice, she exploited local atmospherics to lure visitors through a sequence of immersive spaces.

Devlin spoke with The New York Times by telephone about the inspirations behind her theatrical inventions; the conversation, published September 25, 2026, was edited for length and clarity. The full interview sits behind the Times's paywall, but the assignment itself signals the foundation's ambition: a designer best known for stadium-scale spectacle has been entrusted with framing the quietly exacting work of hundreds of individual makers, "each one an island of talent," as the Times's headline put it.

The choice suggests how Homo Faber intends to close the perceived gap between contemporary spectacle design and traditional craft. Whether Devlin's theatrical devices amplify the artisans' work or overshadow it will become clear as visitors make their own passage through the monastery's maze in the weeks ahead.