- / Impegno civile
Tra neuroplasticità, memoria ed emozione, l’intelligenza umana resta un territorio non replicabile: così il cervello diventa l’ultimo archivio vivente e creativo
ISSUE NO. 31
Annalise June Kamegawa: After the installation ends what happens to The Library of Light? Where does the physical set go?
Es Devlin: “Let’s talk about its pre-life first. This project began in 2018. I was invited by the gallerist Hannah Barry to make an intervention at Bold Tendencies, an arts festival that happens in a multi-story car park in Peckham.
I observed that I was not reading with the same dedication and focus that I used to. The only time I was really focused on my reading was when I was watching an opera and reading the subtitles. When I was rehearsing for a Wagner opera, I would read subtitles sometimes for four hours.
I had the idea to remove the opera completely and just retain the subtitles. We invited about 2,000 people to the rooftop of this multi-story car park and asked them to sit on a rainy night in Peckham and read The Order of Time with me, Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice, and its author, Carlo Rovelli. It was on a simple screen, but it was very long, around 40-metres wide. It was not as complicated as The Library of Light, but that’s where this idea of collective reading started.
Regarding its afterlife, we’ve fabricated the structure to rotate on a rented turntable that will go back into inventory and continue on its life. All of the LED light strips and the LED screens will go back into inventory as well.
All of the books are getting donated to the Milan Public Library System. Additionally, we’ve assembled the shelf elements using mechanical joinery rather than glue fixing, so they can all be dismantled and reused. That’s been the approach and Salone del Mobile have been really great about it—they’re very intent upon making sure they do things properly.”
In the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera, there are many heads—some that speak, others carved from stone or cast in bronze. Among them is a bust of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, quietly facing the Palazzo di Brera. Anonymous to most, her features are carved from the same material as the men who surround her. But in the year of Euroluce, stage designer Es Devlin’s installation The Library of Light—inspired by the Italian mathematician’s “Witch of Agnesi” curve—gives shape, path, and motion to the voiceless bust.
On the Saturday before the public opening, Devlin sits with Lampoon in a corner of the courtyard to talk about the rotating library, brought to life for Salone del Mobile’s 2025 Milano Design Week. In the installation, words from Agnesi and other authors emerge and move through the space. They join a centuries-old choreography: since the 14th century, this courtyard has been a place of passage for Jesuit scholars, art restorers, nuns, students, and tourists. Its four walls hold a crossroads of overlapping stories, folded into the architecture—barely spoken, but still palpable in the air.
Having walked from one side to the other, Devlin and Lampoon trace yet another invisible line through the space—adding to the story still being written in the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera.
AJK You’ve said that your work oftentimes starts with a first gesture. What was the first gesture for The Library of Light?
ED: “During the first visit, I walked around this courtyard and I took in all the statues. If you walk around, you’ll see they are all men. I found one woman and I started looking into her work —she’s called Maria Gaetana Agnesi. She drew a famous curve that was a combination of straight lines and circles and it was called ‘la versiera di Agnesi.’
Her work built on the study of resonance, of how pendulums swing. It was something that Galileo had been looking at 80 years before she was born. Galileo was actually put under house arrest as a heretic for suggesting that natural things had their own movement rather than movement given to them from God. She’s emerging from this delicate, precarious time for mathematics.
Then I explored the library, the art museum, the students’ area here. There’s a school of set design and a school of fine art. I observed how people walk across this courtyard, often in straight lines. The animals and birds fly in straight lines over it as well. I then thought it could be resonant to introduce Agnesi’s curve, the incomplete circle, the revolve.
I thought it would be very interesting to take a gesture that everybody has seen—a book shelf. People have different reactions to libraries. Some people love them. Some people hate them and don’t like to read. I thought, ‘what if I take something that already resonates with people, but make it kinetic and curve it.’
The next gesture was light. It is the year of Euroluce, of light. This sculpture is illuminated all day long. Around 7:30 p.m., as the sun sets, something quite magical happens in here. Normally, this place closes at 7:00 so just having the public here after that brings something slightly anarchic to the order of the place. It feels a bit like staying on at school after hours in the dark, running down the corridors.
The introduction of a disrupting circle to the rectilinear plan of the place, and the fact that it’s open after hours, feels like a gesture of disruption as well as extension of the library that’s already here.”
AJK: The Pinacoteca di Brera used to be a monastery and then it was a Jesuit school. There’s a lot of religious connotations here that brings up the concept of circumambulation, or the religious procession around a certain point.
ED: “While rehearsing the piece, we’ve observed, that we were practicing exactly that circumambulation. You could see that between me and the composers, Jade and Andy, we were walking around, following Na Li, the violinist who will be performing on the first evening. You naturally want to follow her and read the text.
I wonder if people will do that when they visit? It did feel like a ritual gesture— I’m really interested to see if it feels like a ritual.”
AJK: I hesitate to say that it’s a static installation, but it’s not a performance with a traditional beginning and an end like a concert or a play. How does this format change your relationship with time?
ED: “I would say that it’s a kinetic installation. It itself is a performer that performs. It reads aloud all day long. You heard us rehearsing the evening performance which will take place for the public every night at 8pm.
Throughout the day, it reads about two and a half hours of text from fifty different authors. We have James Baldwin, Tony Morrison, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Joanna Macy, Margaret Atwood.
There are about 3,200 books in this library. It’s basically half empty but it’s just as well half full. And purposefully so! We thought it would be a really hubristic gesture to suggest we knew what books to put here. We chose half the books, but we’re really hoping the public will come and fill it. We would love visitors to come and think, ‘Why didn’t they quote this book? This library needs this book!’ and contribute it to the installation. At the end, all of these books are getting donated to the Milan Public Library System.
There’s a selection chosen by the publishing house, Feltrinelli. In fairness, they initially provided 2,200 and I got here and said, ‘we need more!’ So they were very kind in providing the 3,200 books.”
AJK: Seeing how empty over 3,000 books can look is somewhere between fatalistic and hopeful. It feels like it would take a lifetime to read that many books.
ED: “Umberto Eco famously had over 50,000 books. His idea was that your library should always be full of books you haven’t read. It represents the knowledge you don’t yet have. He suggests that the idea that you have to have read all your books is nonsense. The whole point of a library is having these books to remind you of what don’t yet know and what there still is to know.
He said, ‘the library is a compass of the mind,’ which is where this whole idea sprung from.”
AJK: Do you perform live ever?
ED: “In the installation, you hear my voice at the beginning, reading Maria Gaetana Agnesi. It’s then followed by the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch reading.
I haven’t yet performed live, but I have spoken on some albums. We have an album called An Atlas of Es Devlin with Polyphonia. It gathers the soundtracks from the artworks referenced in the exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt.
There’s also a track called Children of the Internet that has my voice on it. It’s by the British artist and rapper, Dave, and a group called Future Utopia. It won an Ivor Novello award, which is quite a big deal.”
AJK: You’ve begun to break the barrier between designer and stage by becoming a performer yourself. How has that changed your relationship both with the stage and the audience?
ED: “I think I’ve always believed that objects have voices. An object can create an environment. It can also partake in a speech, play, story, or narrative. I think audiences pick up signals of everything. When you’re making a set design for a play, one small prop can throw an audience towards one association or another . That’s because everything has a voice and objects are talking to us all the time. We just need to be reminded to pay attention to them.
For me, when I shift from making an environment of objects that speak in choral conjunction with the voices of singers and actors, to objects performing directly in constellation with an audience, it’s not too much of a step
I’ve observed that an audience will sit still and listen to an object speak. I think the more attention we pay to things that are not human the better —be they objects, other species, algorithms, or really anything that is not ourselves—they are worthy of more attention than we often give them.”
AJK: Is there one narrative that you’ve repeatedly returned to that you may want to tackle in the future?
ED: “I’d be very interested in taking on a book like The Masterand His Emissary or The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, and turning that into an oratorio. I think oratorio is a really interesting medium because the way we receive sung language is different from the way we receive spoken language.
The mass choir is an instrument that humans become part of. Our rib cages start to resonate with a choir, especially if it’s sitting around us, if the audience sits inside amongst the choir while they sing an oratorio. The work of Iain McGilchrist largely reflects on the distinction between the way the left hemisphere of the brain and the right hemisphere of the brain do the same things, but in different ways. He hypothesizes that this has led to a crisis that could potentially lead to our extinction. I’m pretty interested in presenting that as an urgent oratorio.”
AJK: You’ve done a lot of hand-drawn work like that done for ‘Congregation’ and ‘Come Home Again.’ With your projects, how do you navigate the space between the conceptual (thinking and writing) and the physical (drawing and modelling)?
ED: “I had a really amazing encounter last night with one of my heroes, Bob Wilson, who is also here making a some works for 2025’s Salone del Mobile. He said, ‘I think while I’m drawing. Me drawing is me thinking.’
And I would say that one thinks with one’s fingers. We all do. You think with your feet, the hair on your arms, the edge of your ears. All of it is thinking. We are all synaesthetic because we’re human. The systems by which we live have helped us to forget that. The aim of pretty much everything I do is to try to counter that collective act of forgetting with a bit of collective remembering of what we already can do.”
AJK: There’s this beautiful interview with Ed Atkins, where he expresses the transition of being a young person who just liked to draw to now having these experimental ideas about image. Why do you think people inclined to something so simple and childish as drawing end up having these more philosophical views later on in life?
ED: “I think it’s openness. All the portals to those things that seem natural to us as children—like picking up a pencil and drawing or dancing—tend to close based on the systems to which we’re invited to adhere as we grow up: these largely industrial, late-capitalist systems. I would say that anyone who is open to continuing those activities that one’s invited to cease, is probably open to exploring in general.
It includes philosophic inquiry about what life is, because so many of the systems in place ask us to stop being curious.”
AJK: You exist in this world between aesthetics and language. What is something that you believe has yet to be expressed in words?
ED: “I mean, so many things! I think again immediately of something I read very recently in McGilchrist’s books. He talks about how strenuously we have to work to stop language from blocking us from comprehending the world.
Another writer I read a lot is David Abram. He’s a slight-of-hand magician and geophilosopher who talks a lot about language. He proposes that the human animal always sang. We used to sing the sound of a stream because there was a stream present. We would automatically emulate the sound of the magpie, crow, or song thrush.
Even when we began our written languages, we would emulate the traces left by animals. These systems were ideographic: we would draw something that looked like the antlers of a deer and that became Delta. At a certain point with the Phoenicians, who created the phonetic alphabet, Delta got turned on its side and no longer made any visual reference to the deer. Language became unmoored from the rest of the things in our biosphere.
Abram would argue that this unmooring was the point of deviation of humans from the rest of the biosphere. The letter B is just an infinite mirror loop between the letter B and the human mouth saying ‘bee, bee, bee, bee.’
He suggests that we’re caught to a degree in our own codes, in a sort of mirror maze. It’s always a dilemma for him because he’s a writer and language is his instrument. Yet he knows that the minute a thought, or an instinct, or a gesture is transcribed into language, it loses a lot .
When you ask what hasn’t been put into words, I’d say pretty much everything hasn’t been put into words. Language is a complete parallel universe that we swim in. It’s an element in which we live, but I do think we greatly benefit from time spent in the non-verbal.”
Es Devlin in an artist and designer whose work spans from installations at the Tate Modern, V&A and Serpentine to Wagner operas and large scale stadium sculptures for concert tours. In 2023, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design in New York held a retrospective of her work that holds the same title as her book, An Atlas of Es Devlin. The Library of Light, brought to life by Salone del Mobile on the occasion of Milano Design Week 2025, is on display in the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera from April 7th – April 21st 2025.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
LAMPOONMAGAZINE.COM is an independent online magazine, properly listed at the Milan Court Register of Press, number 407 / 19 December 2014
The magazine is released by LAMPOON PUBLISHING HOUSE S.r.L.
Italian VAT number 08934300966 – Milan R.E.A. (Economic and Administrative Index) number 2057081 – Italian R.O.C. (Register of Operators in the Communication Field) number 26800 / 8 November 2016 – Copyright 2019 © Lampoon Publishing House. All rights reserved.
