Venice’s Homo Faber Biennial Celebrates Craft on a Spectacular Scale 

Es Devlin often thinks large, having orchestrated Super Bowl halftime shows, the closing ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, dazzling stages for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, and Tony Award–winning sets for The Lehman Trilogy. Yet when Alberto Cavalli and Hanneli Rupert, respectively executive director and vice-chair of the Michelangelo Foundation, approached the celebrated scenographic artist to helm the next edition of the Homo Faber Biennial, Venice’s celebration of contemporary craftsmanship, she immediately saw an opportunity to embrace something simultaneously infinite and intimate. Devlin follows an illustrious roster of creative figures who have conceived previous editions, including Luca Guadagnino, India Mahdavi, and Robert Wilson. More than 700 objects by 500 artisans from 70 countries fill the presentation, and Devlin envisioned the showcase as a vast collaboration that would illuminate not only the objects, but the human hands, painstaking processes, and robust talents behind their creation.  

She realized that vision through 15 immersive installations collectively titled “An Island of Light,” on view September 1–30 and staged throughout the storied rooms and gardens of Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the former Benedictine monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, directly across the lagoon from Piazza San Marco. Devlin and her studio harness the innate power of her preferred media—illumination, reflective surfaces, ethereal soundscapes, kinetic elements—to draw visitors deeper into the processes of making. “I hope they will come away with an understanding of the etymology of objects, the hands that make them, and the conditions in which they are made,” she says, “and to never again pick up an object without thinking about the steps that brought it to their hand.”  

Devlin makes that mission clear from the first installation, which reconstructs a dimly lit atelier haphazardly strewn with tools and raw materials. Visitors sit at sawdust-covered work tables to watch a short film narrated by Devlin in a compelling sotto voce, its perspective fixed on makers’ hands as they carve, fold, stitch, and manipulate matter. Beyond, a hallway of illuminated portraits introduces each artisan before visitors encounter the finished works. “It was important that this exhibition couldn’t be mistaken for a shop,” Devlin says, explaining that exquisitely presented works can easily assume the guise of rarefied commodities that seem to demand one’s money. She wanted the makers to remain central. “I was at pains to ensure that where you start is messy,” she continues, “and the first engagement is in the beautiful chaos of making.”  

Perhaps that sense of discovery distinguishes Homo Faber from more conventional exhibitions of contemporary design. An atmosphere of “how’d they do that?” pervades, sparked as much by the extraordinary objects as by Devlin’s sorcery-like approach to scenography, which magnifies their material ingenuity through mind-bending displays. In “An Alphabet of Objects,” visitors stand inside a slowly rotating structure lined with works chosen for their distinctive silhouettes, from a braided, serpentine cast-brass candelabra by Pinto, Ateliers Saint Jacques, and Fonderie de Coubertin to Leonardo Cappellini’s olive-burl vessels, which resemble amphorae freshly excavated from the earth. As the structure turns like a carousel, illumination picks out their earthen surfaces and throws elongated shadows across the surrounding walls, transmuting the objects into an enveloping hieroglyphic procession Devlin likens to an artisanal alphabet. 

Further in, Devlin draws San Giorgio Maggiore itself into the scenography, responding to its architecture and lagoon setting. “A Full Moon Rising” celebrates Korean moon jars, the white porcelain vessels named for their generous, nearly spherical profiles. Devlin gives them a characteristically theatrical home inside Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s former 1960s swimming pool, arranging moon jars and like-minded vessels along a semicircular display reflected in the water below. As the structure rises and submerges itself, the room gradually darkens until the spectacle resembles a pale moon ascending above an inky sea.

In another room, Devlin etches luminous illustrations of Venice’s arched windows across mirrored surfaces. Central glass vitrines hold extraordinary bird-inspired jewels by independent makers and such storied maisons as Cartier, Buccellati, and Van Cleef & Arpels, while crafted creatures peer from glowing apertures that transform the chamber into a glittering aviary. That carries into the ambulacrum of the site’s Palladian Refectory, where enormous paper sculptures of Venetian birdlife are frozen mid-flight overhead. Chinese artist Wen Qiuwen crafted the kestrels, egrets, and herons from Devlin’s drawings, their luminescent bodies aglow like spiritual beings. 

For all its theatrical panache, Homo Faber also offers ample opportunity to observe craftsmanship at close range—and even try one’s own hands at it. In “An Atelier Alive,” artisans work in real time across porcelain, leather, paper, and textiles while restorers demonstrate the techniques involved in reviving works of art. The makers remain on hand to answer questions about their processes amid the workshop-like clutter of sketches and half-finished objects, wafting aromas of clay and metal, and the sharp percussion of tools at work. There are participatory workshops devoted to the traditional Japanese crafts of kintsugi and hanko. Italian origami artist Giuseppe Romeo leads a free paper-folding laboratory in which visitors create elegant white flowers; each contribution will join a communal installation that will grow through September.  

Devlin also makes a point of threading sound throughout Homo Faber, and one of the most compelling moments arrives as a sensory reset after the abundance of crafted objects. In the Palladian cloister, A Great Turning centers on a large kinetic mirror suspended above a shallow reflecting pool. The electromechanical structure pivots on two axes while Benedictine chants reverberate in the arcades. Devlin’s band, Polyphonia, composed the soundscape using music preserved in the site’s library and acoustics captured inside the basilica, evoking chants that would have echoed here centuries ago. In an adjacent cloister sit 20 giant rectangular panels, each framing a circular motif derived from the cymatics, or the patterns of vibrational resonance, of San Giorgio’s bells. Twenty artisans interpreted those patterns through distinct crafts, from leather sculpting and stained glass to embroidery and featherwork. 

The sheer amount of talent on display is astounding, and at times overwhelming. “I could spend another month here,” Devlin says with a smile, though she laughs off the prospect of choosing a favorite object. “That’s like picking one of my children.” Instead, she considers the objects collectively. “To me, it’s the conversation between all of them,” she says. “What I’ve really tried to do here is to sequence them so that you can read them intelligibly in groups of objects.” The progression, she adds, makes the experience “legible and digestible.” 

That abundance also serves a larger purpose for Cavalli, who frames Homo Faber as a paean to the ingenuity of humanity at a moment when AI is proliferating at dizzying speed. Beyond the biennial, Homo Faber supports craftsmanship through educational programs and an online guide to independent artisans. “Promoting artisanship, human talent, and creativity means promoting freedom of choice,” Cavalli muses. “Those who dream of artificial intelligence are free to do so, but there are other dreams which have the same right to exist: the dream of being able to name those who create the objects we use, of transforming a talent into a profession, and of making one’s hands a tool to change the world.” In an age of frictionless generation, Homo Faber makes a thrilling case for the irreplaceable intelligence of the human hand.