Es Devlin casts Homo Faber 2026 in a new light

Upon entering this year’s Homo Faber – the fourth edition of the biennial showcase staged on Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore – visitors find a workshop caught in a moment of pause. Tools and materials lie scattered across benches; illuminated shelves are strewn with models, maquettes, samples and dust, as though the artisans have momentarily stepped outside. Then, from the darkness at the far end of the room, a screen flickers into life with footage of skilled hands at work. Narrated in the soothing voice of British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, the exhibition’s artistic director (and a new Wallpaper* guest editor), the film prepares us for the onward journey.

‘As you meet each piece, you're meeting a pair of hands and a body and a mind – a conduit to place, conditions, culture, weather, ideas and time,' says Devlin. 'Every object was made in a room like this, at a table covered in tools and trash, each found its form from chaos.' A door swings open and we are ushered through.

It is exactly this kind of atmospheric scene-setting – Devlin’s ability to harness light and sound to create an almost spiritual experience – for which she has become globally renowned, from stage designs for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour and U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas to the kinetic UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. At Homo Faber, she follows in the footsteps of film director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini, who directed the 2024 edition.

The biennial is produced by the Michelangelo Foundation, a Geneva-based nonprofit established in 2016 by Richemont chairman Johann Rupert and Italian cultural entrepreneur Franco Cologni. Rupert serves as its president, while his daughter Hanneli Rupert, the Foundation’s executive vice-president, has led the development of Homo Faber since 2022. Devlin’s ability to combine large-scale scenography with an emphasis on individual human stories makes her a natural choice.

Across the sequence of 15 spaces that follows, we encounter a potentially overwhelming array of more than 700 objects by over 500 makers from upwards of 70 countries. Using this year’s theme, An Island of Light, as an organising principle, Devlin has structured the exhibition around different ways of perceiving craft: maker, silhouette, material, element, process, translucency, colour and sound. By doing so, she encourages us to slow our pace and look at familiar materials and objects anew.

In An Alphabet of Objects a circular rotating structure that you can walk in and around (something of a Devlin trademark, seen this year in Milan and at Castle Howard, UK) carries more than 100 works across it shelves. Visitors can examine the objects from all angles as they slowly sail past, casting extraordinary shadows on the walls.

Further on, in Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s former 1960s swimming pool, a glowing semicircular shelf laden with rotund vessels emerges from the water like a rising moon, illuminating the darkened space. In the background, Devlin recites Jean Toomer’s Evening Song: ‘Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, / Lakes and moon and fires, / Cloine tires, / Holding her lips apart.’

Called Full Moon Rising, the display pays homage to the Korean moon jar – a centuries-old functional vessel with a moon-like silhouette made of two halves – through specially commissioned interpretations handcrafted in ceramics, paper, glass, metal and other materials displayed in two rows that run along either side of the pool. The effect is hypnotic, encouraging visitors to lose themselves in their surfaces. From the rock-like texture of Patricia Shone’s Earth Jar to the six tentacles and countless eyes of Heidi Tarver’s Moon over the Pacific, each one invites closer inspection.

In A Rooted Ascent, Devlin asked the curators to find objects made exclusively from materials that had 'started as a seed' – including wood, reeds and lacquer. What interests her is the extraordinary variety produced by human hands from this shared organic origin – from the wild, untamed form of pieces like Andrea Mancuso's Silva chair made in collaboration with master carpenter Luciano Tousco, to Heechan Kim’s staggeringly intricate #20 sculpture, in which maple veneer is bent into flawless curves and stitched with copper wire.

In An Atelier Alive guests are given the chance to see the master artisans at work. In a polished studio space surrounded by dozens of completed masterpieces, embroiderer Laura Baverstock told us about the 200 hours she spent creating a watch dial for Vacheron Constantin featuring a prowling tiger, worked in nine-carat yellow- and white-gold embroidery wire, specially developed black ceramic-coated wire and green silk. Across all three editions attended by Wallpaper*, these encounters with makers have consistently proved the exhibition’s most illuminating element.

'The main protagonists of this work are the artisans themselves, they are the rockstars for me,' Devlin stressed, and for much of the exhibition this is overwhelmingly true: their 500 portraits even constitute one of its 15 immersive installations. In some of the more visually stimulating spaces, however, the scenography occasionally threatens to eclipse the work it was designed to illuminate.

Inside the dizzyingly mirrored An Infinite Birdsong, for example, it is easy to become absorbed by the kaleidoscopic experience rather than the individual pieces of bird- and insect-inspired jewellery. It reveals the tightrope Devlin must walk throughout: how to use spectacle to command attention for craft without allowing spectacle to become the principal attraction.

In an era of artificial intelligence, algorithmic sameness and frictionless consumption, it is moving to witness the extraordinary dedication these artisans bring to their work. An Island of Light treats craft as embodied knowledge, illuminating the intimate relationship between human hands, natural materials and time – forms of intelligence that are increasingly at risk of being undervalued.

'When I was a teenager, there was a famous song by Grace Jones called “Slave to the Rhythm”,' remarked Homo Faber’s general director Alberto Cavalli at the opening. 'I’m afraid this new generation is becoming rather slave to the algorithm.' Manual skill, he argued, offers young people a means of affirming their individuality, vision and creativity.

Homo Faber is, in part, an exercise in resisting the digital trend: giving forms of specialist knowledge an international platform and demonstrating that, far from nostalgic, they remain capable of evolution. Here, makers and their work are treated with a degree of theatrical seriousness more commonly reserved for fine art.

Yet the exhibition also advances a particular conception of craft: exceptional, rarefied, exquisitely staged and frequently aligned with the luxury market. That is hardly accidental. Richemont’s maisons depend upon the proposition that hand skill, rarity, time and inherited knowledge imbue an object with value. Supporting the craft ecosystem is therefore not wholly detached philanthropy; it also protects the skills and value system upon which brands including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vacheron Constantin rely.

This does not make Homo Faber’s mission disingenuous. Rather, it reveals the complexity – and perhaps the effectiveness – of the enterprise: cultural, philanthropic and commercial interests collide in a shared argument for the value of human making. At its best, An Island of Light makes that argument powerfully.

Homo Faber runs until 30 September 2026, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice

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