Contemporary artistic craftsmanship returns to Venice for Homo Faber, the event organized and curated by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, that promotes the creative transformation of materials. Under Es Devlin’s artistic direction, the 2026 edition is scheduled to run from 1 to 30 September

An Island of Light: this is the title of the fourth edition of Homo Faber, the upcoming event on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. With the aim of celebrating artisanal craftsmanship, fifteen immersive installations will welcome dozens of prominent figures from around the world, thanks to a collaboration with the Giorgio Cini Foundation and the Cologni Foundation for the Arts and Crafts. The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a coffee-table book tracing the history of Homo Faber from 2018 to the present day, published by Marsilio Arte.
We asked Es Devlin, artistic director of the upcoming edition, to tell us more.

Light is at the heart of the new edition of Homo Faber and is also one of the elements that best define Venice’s identity. How have you structured the narrative of Homo Faber 2026 around this theme, combining it with artisanal expertise?
For Homo Faber 2026, I knew that light was something I wanted to find through the hands of artisans, and to look at how one could frame everything that is being done by 500 pairs of hands as a manipulation of light. You could say that every object is a dance with light and that both the materials and the objects have come through an interaction with light, with the sun, with everything we are made of.

To what extent has your artistic practice influenced the guidelines for your artistic direction of the upcoming edition of Homo Faber?
I work in theatre, in opera, in art installation. Pretty much all that I make is time-based, it’s about sequencing. So I really wanted to approach this in that way – how do I sequence encounters with at least 700 objects so that it doesn’t become overwhelming? It’s about ensuring that you don’t have to go to a footnote to understand the connection between them. As soon as you walk in you will be eased through a sequence of very diverse objects.

In a society dominated by consumerism, what is the strength of craftsmanship, and how will this be conveyed by the upcoming edition of Homo Faber?
We are living in a society that constantly invites us to be fragmented, distracted, to consume. This exhibition is a sort of active resistance to that constant consumption of things that we use once and throw away. Each of these artisans lives as an active resistance to the forces of dilution and fragmentation over consumption. So yes, it’s ambitious, resistant and – we hope – life changing.

Interview by Arianna Testino

https://www.homofaber.com/

BIO
British artist and designer Es Devlin views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works. Her major installation works have focused on some of London’s most vital communities: in Congregation (2024) she made chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who brought their gifts to the city, having experienced displacement. In Come Home Again (2022) she drew 243 of London’s most endangered species and installed them outside Tate Modern, underscored by London’s diasporic choirs. In 2018 she painted one of Trafalgar Square’s bronze lions fluorescent red and invited visitors to feed it words that formed a collective poem projected onto Nelson’s Column.
She designed Dear England at the National Theatre (2023) which brought together the UK’s football and theatre communities, the UK Pavilion at the World Expo (2021) which gathered millions of visitors’ words into a global collective poem, the 2022 Superbowl Halftime show and the London 2012 Olympics Closing Ceremony.