How do you present craftsmanship without slipping into nostalgia? Es Devlin answers with light. For the fourth edition of Homo Faber, the British artist transforms San Giorgio Maggiore into An Island of Light: an archipelago of more than 500 artisans, around 700 objects and 15 installations, linked by light, water, reflections and movement. For a month, Venice becomes the setting for a discipline in which the finished object is only part of the story. How something is made is at least as interesting as what is made.
Homo Faber is at its most compelling when it makes the journey to the finished object visible. Behind every piece are choices, knowledge of materials and skills that cannot be reduced to a flawless surface. That is exactly where Devlin directs the light – literally and figuratively. From 1 to 30 September, Homo Faber takes over the historic rooms and gardens of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Devlin uses the topography of the lagoon as the starting point for her staging. Each artisan becomes an island in their own right, with an individual body of knowledge, skill and experience. Together they form an archipelago, connected by Devlin through light, shadow, water and reflections.
Light plays an unusual role. It does not simply illuminate what is already there. It hits glass and refracts, passes through paper, traces structures, shifts colours and surfaces. Materials respond to light, revealing qualities that are easy to miss at a quick glance at a beautiful object. A conventional display of craft becomes a spatial narrative about materials and their transformation. Devlin unfolds this narrative across 15 installations. A Language of Hands first turns attention to the hand itself, An Index of Artisans to the people behind the work. In An Alphabet of Objects, more than a hundred pieces become luminous silhouettes, creating a kind of visual grammar of form, shadow and material
A Full Moon Rising promises to be particularly atmospheric. In the former Piscina Gandini swimming pool, traditional Korean moon jars and delicate ceramics meet water, reflections and light. A Rooted Ascent focuses on wood, cork and plant fibres, pairing the objects on display with live demonstrations of how they are made. In An Atelier Alive, the exhibition finally becomes a workshop: masters from different disciplines work on site, allowing visitors to see first-hand how material becomes object.
Venice itself also feeds into Devlin’s concept. In the Palladio cloister, A Great Turning responds to the geometry of Renaissance architecture with kinetic elements, water and light. A Luminous Ark populates the refectory ambulatory with paper sculptures of lagoon fauna. For A Feast of Light, Devlin gathers only white works in porcelain, hand-blown glass, textiles and paper around a large illuminated table. Only then does A Rainbow of Forms break up the white, with resin, enamel and plastics translating light into colour. The staging is meticulously composed. Yet the concept’s real strength may lie in the way it draws attention back to something very concrete: making.
This is not the same as a romantic return to the handmade. Nor does Homo Faber present craft as an alternative to technology and industrial production. The more interesting question is what kind of knowledge these objects hold. Familiarity with a material develops over years, sometimes generations. Techniques can be documented and passed on. But the confidence to respond when a material behaves differently from one stage of the process to the next comes only through doing.
This also sharpens the meaning of Homo Faber – the human as maker. At a time when production can increasingly be detached from people, the exhibition looks not only at the product but at the ability to make something. It is not an argument against new technologies, but a close examination of what human skill actually consists of.
That this conversation takes place in Venice is more than a picturesque choice. The city itself is almost unimaginable without highly specialised craft. For centuries, glass, stone, wood, metal, textiles and paper have shaped not only its objects but its architecture and culture. Behind the image of Venice lies a history of workshops, techniques and people who mastered materials and passed that knowledge on. Homo Faber therefore carries this story beyond San Giorgio Maggiore. With Homo Faber in Città, the city itself becomes part of the programme. Around 130 local workshops and Murano glassmakers can be discovered through the Homo Faber Guide. Two exhibitions at Casa Sanlorenzo extend the programme, while Murano Illumina il Mondo brings twelve chandeliers designed by international artists and made on Murano to Piazza San Marco.
Homo Faber 2026 also shifts something else: the distance between visitor and object. Ninety Young Ambassadors from international design and art schools guide visitors through the exhibition, explain techniques and tell the stories of the people behind the work. Open workshops, demonstrations and opportunities for visitors to work with materials themselves add another layer. The aim is not simply to photograph the object, but to understand it – at least a little.
At the end, Devlin’s route leads through the Cypress Cloister. Twenty Silent Songs brings together twenty collaborative works by master ateliers from five continents. Twenty works, twenty different traditions – and once again the idea of the archipelago that began it all: individual islands of skill, connected to one another. Perhaps that is exactly what an exhibition about craft needs to do today: not explain why we should preserve it, but show why it fascinates us. Es Devlin switches on the light.
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