Faena Art presents this week Library of Us by the British artist Es Devlin. Appearing on Faena Beach is the creator’s kinetic masterpiece—a 50-foot-wide triangular bookshelf showcasing 4,200 books that have influenced her life and philosophy—that began with the Library of Light at Salone del Mobile last year. The library rotates like a compass needle, encouraging visitors to read as their seats revolve around each other. Throughout the week, it will enounce subject matter from selected books in the artist’s voice, and over 250 texts will beam through an LED screen embedded within the shelves. Following the presentation, all books will be donated to Miami public libraries.
Whitewall spoke with Devlin about the origins of Library of Us and how she will be enjoying Miami Art Week.
Es Devlin on the Power of Books and Libraries
Portrait of Es Devlin. Photograph by Daniel Devlin. Courtesy of artist.
WHITEWALL: For Library of Us, you’ve assembled thousands of books that have shaped your philosophy and practice. How did you select these texts?
ES DEVLIN: One of the questions I am asked most regularly at talks, often by students and young artists and designers, is, “Where do your ideas come from?” Library of Us aims to explore this question. As you sit at the circular reading table, you will encounter a series of books and a sequence of people who revolve into your orbit and then rotate out again. If you sit at the table long enough, a person you encountered a cycle ago may return to face you. Perhaps when you meet again, you’ll both turn to the next pages of the texts you’d been discussing 15 minutes earlier.
Perhaps your perspective will have been influenced in the interim by the encounters you may have had with other books, other people, phrases you’ve heard being read aloud, a view you’ve had of the sunset, the sea, the city or a seagull. Perhaps you’ll find an unexpected association between some words you’re reading on the page and a quotation you hear read aloud or see beamed through the LED line. In a way, the work is a model of a life spent in collaboration with people, language, geometry, and place.
In the circular, shallow dark pool at the centre of the sculpture, the books’ titles will be reflected backwards, their spines will be chopped and churned together with fragments of reflected sky, people and weather, by gusts of wind or by barefoot visitors breaking the water’s mirrored skin. When the pool’s surface is still, the triangle will double its height in reflection, its revolving form will seem to penetrate beneath the surface of the sand, to peer down to a sky below.
The triangular form of the bookshelf echoes that of a compass needle seeking true north: a mirrored dial that camouflages, loses, and finds itself in reflected people, buildings, sky, sea, and night.
WW: You describe the audience as a temporary community whose seats revolve into an encounter. After the installation ends and the books are donated to public libraries, how do you view the work’s legacy?
ED: In a way, each of us is a library—a storehouse of ancestral volumes and contemporary scrawls and songs. Perhaps an encounter with this work, like any encounter, will be stored in the libraries of all of us who share it. I think places also remember the works they’ve hosted. The beach in Miami remembers the swirling screen of Refik Anadol’s Coral Dreams, Leandro Ehrlich’s row of sinking sand cars, and Jim Denevan’s round table. Each time we pass this spot on the beach, we conjure the layers of works through time that these sands have supported.
Jorge Luis Borges said, “I am not sure I exist actually, I am every book I’ve ever read.” The books that I am will become accessible to thousands of readers in Miami public libraries once the work is dismantled. Each book will be marked by a small circular hole where it was threaded into the sculpture to resist the forces of wind and rain. The pages may be swelled by salt and sea, like a book that’s been read on the beach. Fragments of this work will travel into people’s homes and minds for as long as the libraries continue to lend out books.
“We conjure the layers of works through time that these sands have supported,”
-Es Devlin
Portrait of Es Devlin, photo by Victor Picon. Courtesy of artist.
Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern.
WW: Library of Us is embedded in a particular cultural and geographic context in Miami Beach. How does this particular site at Faena—the climate, audience, traditions, or social dynamics—shape this iteration? How is it different from your previous library installations, such as Library of Light in Milan?
ED: The idea for a “collective reading” took root about a decade ago. I realised I was not reading books with the same level of focus as I used to. My immersion in the text had become constantly interrupted by the phone in my pocket, calling me with its dopamine promise, wanting to take part in whatever I was learning. At the time I was working on a German opera production. I read the subtitles steadily for up to four hours in rehearsal without interruption by the silenced phone. I found consolation in this and began to consider subtracting the opera and presenting a subtitles screen on its own as a “collective reading.”
We made the first iteration of the idea as a monumental 100-foot wide horizontal screen on the roof of a multi-story car park in Peckham, South London in 2018, commissioned by the British curator Hannah Barry. An audience of 2000 gathered at Bold Tendencies to read a 24-minute extract from Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, accompanied by the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch with an underscore drawn from Rovelli’s reference to a Bach Violin concerto.
I Saw the World End was commissioned in 2020 by The Imperial War Museum, London, to commemorate 75 years since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the text was presented in Japanese and English, two contrasting voices reading collages of texts meeting either side of a bisecting line of light across the 150-foot span of Europe’s largest LED screen in Piccadilly Circus, London.
The next experiment took place earlier this year in Milan in April 2025 in the Pinacoteca di Brera Museum. We developed the circular geometry of Library of Light to honour La Versiera di Agnesi—the mathematical curved diagram invented by Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the one female scholar I found in the Pinacoteca’s venerable courtyard full of statues of male enlightenment thinkers.
In each iteration, the terms of engagement for the audience have evolved: there’s a single voice in The Order of Time, while in I Saw the World End, the audience is asked to accommodate two contrasting perspectives at once. The cylindrical geometry of Library of Light holds visitors within its central amphitheater, offering them a view of the surrounding 18th-century courtyard’s sculpted scholars through the gaps in the half-empty bookshelf.
The mode of participation for the audience in Library of Us is quite distinct from Library of Light. Rather than browsing the shelves of the library, they are seated in a more formal encounter with texts and with one another: they sit face to face rather than side by side. This arrangement has been influenced by the sustained face-to-face encounters with strangers that I carried out last year for the choral portrait installation Congregation, which is showing now in NYC at the Perelman Arts Center from Dec 9–Jan 4, 2026.
Each work is made in response to the specific conditions of its location. While Library of Light is a response to an enclosed 18th-century courtyard within an Italian Museum densely packed with treasured works of art and literature, Library of Us oscillates its passengers between the waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the lights of the city, its compass needle cycling between North, Central and South America and the islands in between. Like Miami, this Library speaks in Spanish and Creole, as well as English—and any Spanish speaking visitors will be offered a pair of Rayban Meta glasses, which translate the texts as they hear them.
Es Devlin, “Library of Light” at Pinacoteca di Brera. Courtesy of artist.
WW: How will you be spending your time in Miami outside of your activation?
ED: I’ll be giving talks at Faena Art and Design Miami, and we are planning a revolving dinner on the Library of Us, called The Edible Library, for Chase Sapphire Reserve members. Each course will be a translation of a quote from one of the books into food—a dinner where guests eat ideas and revolve to encounter new dining partners across the table for each course. I will spend some time in Wynwood and Allapattah at Superblue Miami where Forest of Us has been on display for five years. We’ll visit Camp Matecumbe Park and Gwen Cherry Park to see how the trees and shrubs from Five Echoes, our 2021 Jungle Plaza installation, have been thriving. Commissioned by Chanel, the 4,000 plants, shrubs, and trees that comprised the work were replanted by One Tree Planted and Million Trees Miami in 2022.
I also aim to visit the fairs at Art Basel, SCOPE, and Untitled, and will start each day with a swim in the ocean.
