On Miami Beach this week, Es Devlin has built a 50ft illuminated library in a pool of water that slowly revolves, inviting strangers to sit across from one another and read. The British artist says the work is about learning to hold two opposing ideas as equally true.
The installation, Library of Us, was commissioned by Faena Art to mark its tenth year of Miami Art Week projects. It anchors a three-part presentation that extends into the nearby Faena Cathedral and Project Room.
Surrounding the 2,500 volumes on bookshelves within the central reflecting pool are tables with 33 seats per side, each with a book marked with Devlin’s annotations—and the inner seats rotate.
“I’ve put books opposite each other that I think will make for an interesting conversation,” Devlin said from her book-lined studio. “These shelves contain a multitude of non-aligned ideas.”
Devlin says she usually reads five different books at once, specifically because she enjoys seeing conflicting arguments play out side-by-side. Her attachment to books began with weekly visits to her small-town library in Rye, England. “There was always the anxiety on a Tuesday night: did we have our library books ready to return?”
She later studied English literature at Bristol University. She says the sound, etymology, history and meaning of words have become central to her work.
“Three different books by unrelated authors can shape my understanding of how the mind works and how that affects life on the planet,” Devlin says, citing the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. “That all feeds back into every piece of work I make.”
For the Library of Us, Devlin has been copying her handwritten annotations into duplicate editions of books from her collection, provided by Penguin Random House and Strand Books—a process she likened to “a parent marking the height of their children on a doorframe as they grow.” A 30ft-wide LED band will also display passages from 250 of the books as recordings of her voice reading the texts are played aloud.
“My children were two toddlers once and now they’re two teenagers, but I really enjoyed reading to them,” she says. “Before I had kids, I probably would never have read these books aloud.”
Books in the lobby of the Faena Hotel Miami Beach are available for visitors to browse and read Photo: Liliana Mora
The idea of collective reading grew from realising how smartphones had fragmented her attention. Around the same time, while designing the stage sets for a production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, she would read the opera’s on-screen subtitles and wondered if that format could bring people together through shared text.
Her first experiment was in 2018 with an abridged 24-minute version of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (2017), read by Benedict Cumberbatch. With Machiko Weston, she revisited the concept in 2020 in the piece I Saw The World End and again in Milan earlier this year with Library of Light, the precursor to the new work, for which she also gathered the books from which her ideas are drawn and read them aloud.
The earlier work featured a cylindrical form with an amphitheatre inside it. People were seated in tiered rows, surrounded by books and able to browse them. In the Library of Us, the books on shelves within the reflecting pool cannot be browsed, so the primary form of engagement is through the collective reading tables.
“Having done a few tests of this, I realised that people actually become quite focused when you read aloud to them,” Devlin says. “It’s something that we all have in our memories. Most of us were read aloud to as children and most of us are not read aloud to as adults.”
She says the 250 books selected for special treatment are the “lodestars” in her library that she returns to repeatedly. The installation also includes a partnership with Meta Ray-Ban, whose artificial intelligence-enabled glasses will translate passages between Spanish and English, acknowledging Miami’s multilingual audience.
The installation’s debut in Florida—amid political fights over book bans—adds another layer to the project. Florida recorded more than 2,000 school book bans last year, according to Pen America. Devlin says she was inspired by the Haskell Free Library on the border between Canada and the US, a site where people could meet across national lines.
“This idea of books being borderless is something I would like to offer,” she says. “Particularly in the light of the focus on who decides what children in schools get to read… this will provide a counterpoint.”
After the installation closes, the books in Library of Us will be donated to Miami-area schools and libraries, which will not include banned titles. For Devlin, the installation offers a model for civic dialogue.
“If you set up the architecture correctly,” she says, “it can offer a safe space for an encounter with those with a different point of view.”
