Es Devlin Curates Homo Faber in Venice, and the Lagoon Becomes a Craft Atlas

The New York Times reported this week that Es Devlin, the British stage and exhibition designer, has curated the Homo Faber Biennial in the Venetian lagoon, bringing together works by 500 artisans. The paper described each contributor as "an island of talent", a phrase that suits a city whose own geography is a scatter of islands joined by bridges and boats.

Devlin is best known abroad for stadium-scale spectacle: set designs for arena tours and ceremonial occasions that fill the largest rooms in Europe. The Times frames the Venetian project as a deliberate turn in the other direction, a showcase for the art of craft rather than the art of the grand gesture. The headline itself calls her a "master of the extravaganza" who has chosen to highlight handwork instead.

The Biennale form is native to Venice, and the Homo Faber edition sits inside a wider calendar that foreign critics now treat as a permanent fixture of the lagoon's autumn. The Times's framing places the exhibition in the lineage of the art Biennale and the architecture Biennale: a recurring occasion on which the city is asked to hold, and to explain, a very large number of objects and makers at once.

What the foreign coverage emphasises is scale and plurality rather than any single masterpiece: 500 artisans, no hierarchy announced, each presented as self-sufficient. That is an unusual curatorial claim for a city whose museums are built on attribution and connoisseurship. Read from outside Italy, the story is less about any one workshop than about a shift in how the craft economy wants to be seen — not as heritage under glass but as contemporary practice with living authors.

For the cultural economy the Biennale model matters beyond the exhibition itself. Venice's recurring shows draw the international press, the collectors and the museum programmers who then carry Italian makers into other markets, and the Homo Faber edition adds a constituency — designers and applied artists — that the art and architecture Biennales do not always serve. The Times's attention is itself part of that mechanism, which is why the framing of the show abroad tends to outlast the show's own run.

The Italian stake here is soft power of a particular kind. The country's reputation in foreign coverage rests heavily on food, fashion and design, and an exhibition that gathers 500 artisans under one curator's name converts that reputation into a legible event with a date and a place. Whether the makers themselves gain lasting visibility from it is a question the coverage does not yet answer, and one worth watching in the reviews that follow.