The British artist and designer Es Devlin may be best-known for the stage extravaganzas she has concocted for musicians like U2 and Kendrick Lamar, but for the 10th anniversary of the Faena hotel and cultural complex in Miami this year, she has devised a spectacular installation based around a humble subject: books.
During Art Basel Miami Beach, Faena will present, on its beachfront, a 50-foot-tall revolving library titled The Library of Us, which Es Devlin has stocked with 2,500 books that have influenced her. The compass-like installation will be open to the public December 2 through December 7, and visitors will get to sit and read on stools set on a track that revolves so that they encounter one another in the process.
In a statement, Devlin said she is seeking to create “a series of encounters between viewers revolving to meet one another through language around a circular collective reading table.” Phrases from 250 of those books will appear on a 30-inch-wide LED subtitle screen, accompanied by a recording of the artist’s voice reading them aloud.
After the installation comes down on December 9, all 2,500 books will be donated to various organizations throughout Miami, including public libraries and schools. (According to a report last year in the Miami New Times, hundreds of books have been banned from public schools in Florida, however only a handful of those are in Miami-Dade County.)
This isn’t the first installation Devlin has made with books. This past spring, as a commission for Milan’s Salone di Mobile, she presented Library of Light, a circular revolving bookcase presented in the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera. For that piece, people were invited to contribute books that they valued, creating a kind of collective library.
