A Biennial of Hands: Es Devlin Curates 500 Artisans in the Venetian Lagoon

The New York Times reports that Es Devlin, the British stage and set designer known for large-scale spectacle, has turned her attention to the Homo Faber Biennial in the Venetian lagoon, where she has united works by 500 artisans. The newspaper describes each participant as an island of talent, a phrase that suits a city built on islands and long accustomed to reading craft as a form of civic identity.

Devlin's reputation rests on extravaganza — stadium tours, opera stages, the opening ceremonies of large events — and the Times frames her presence here as a deliberate inversion: the master of the spectacle highlighting the art of craft. According to the paper's arts desk, the exhibition is not a survey of luxury objects but an argument about making, about the hand as a repository of knowledge that machines do not hold.

The Homo Faber Biennial takes its name from the Latin tag for the human maker, and it belongs to a wider pattern in how foreign coverage now reads Italy: not only as a country of monuments and museums, but as a living workshop. The Times piece places Devlin at the centre of that reading. Her staging, according to the newspaper, is conceived so that the artisans read as separate islands rather than as a single undifferentiated craft fair — a curatorial decision that echoes the geography of the lagoon itself.

For the cultural economy, the significance lies in the scale. Five hundred makers is a figure the Times states plainly, and it points to a network that runs well beyond Venice: workshops, family firms, and training programmes that foreign correspondents routinely describe as one of the country's less visible exports. Craft, in this framing, is soft power of a particular kind — slower than fashion, less photographed than cinema, but durable.

The Biennial also arrives at a moment when the world's reviewers have been unusually attentive to how Italy presents its own heritage. Devlin's involvement gives the event an international signature, and the Times treats her as the reason to look: a designer of temporary worlds asked to make a permanent argument about skill. What the newspaper does not claim is that the exhibition resolves anything. It reports a gathering, an assembly of makers, and the proposition that craft deserves the same critical attention as art.

For readers outside Italy, the dispatch functions as a reminder that the country's cultural calendar is not only the film festivals and the art biennale. Homo Faber occupies a different register — the workshop rather than the white cube — and the Times's coverage suggests the foreign press will continue to treat it as a serious event rather than a trade show. Whether that attention translates into audiences beyond the lagoon is a question the paper leaves open.