Es Devlin’s ‘Library of Us’ Was the Rare Miami Art Week Spectacle That Invited Quiet Contemplation

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1604287 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/DSF1091.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A large triangular mirrored structure filled with colorful book spines stands on the sand at the edge of the ocean at sunset, surrounded by a circular platform glowing with soft light." width="970" height="728" data-caption='Es Devlin&#8217;s <em>Library of Us</em> at Faena Hotel Miami Beach was much more than an Instagram attraction. <span class=”media-credit”>Photos by Oriol Tarridas</span>’>

Es Devlin’s Library of Us was one of the undeniable Instagram hits of Miami Art Week. Yet despite the hype, the installation the artist conceived for the annual Faena Miami Beach art program was perhaps one of the most successful examples of public art we have seen in Miami, especially when compared to the many monumental yet ephemeral installations of recent years that are mounted to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, obstruct the city’s fragile natural and community ecosystems and leave behind enormous waste in both money and materials.

From December 1 through December 7, the work rose over the white shoreline, a 20-foot-high, 50-foot-wide triangular revolving library containing 2,500 books that have shaped the artist’s philosophy, life and practice. The books also represented the broader human endeavor to understand and interpret the world, the nature of time and the essence of reality. Beneath the mirrored artwork, a 60-foot pool casts endless reflections, suggesting an infinite multiplication of this trove of knowledge far beyond the limits of a single human life.

What Devlin created was a true public space for the sharing of human knowledge and experience. On a 70-foot-wide reading table, visitors were invited to take a book, read, reflect and exchange thoughts while seated on a slowly rotating platform that gently imposes another tempo, a suspension of time that encourages meditation and contemplation. One could immerse oneself in a book or simply in the beauty of the surrounding nature, particularly at dusk, when the sun descended and Devlin’s library stood silhouetted against a sky shifting from pastel pink to purple, igniting briefly into red before dissolving into the darkness and then into starlight. The entire experience invited us to be present in body and mind, before and beyond the relentless, distracting flow of information and misinformation that, in its overexposure, often leaves far less than what a single page of a book or a genuine human exchange can offer.

The installation, as the artist explains, was about “seeing through the eyes of others.” The 2,500 authors whose books were housed in the library each offered a different point of view, a distinct angle of inquiry on our world, society and reality itself. Gathered inside this monumental structure, they formed a physical, palpable archive of human knowledge and imagination, standing in stark contrast to the accelerated fragmentation, dematerialization and frequent hollowing of meaning produced by the endless availability of content. In that boundless flow, knowledge is often decontextualized, synthesized and compressed to the point of losing its original essence and, even more crucially, the meaning that emerges through the connective tissue between ideas.

What remains is a flattening, a rapid obsolescence, a dissolution of the human and cultural depth from which knowledge originates, particularly when its circulation, elaboration and production become increasingly dependent on the technology of digital intelligence. But even A.I. is continuously trained and nourished by the immense library of knowledge accumulated by humankind over time and will only continue to grow with that type of input, if not drift outward as a simple hallucination.

Jorge Luis Borges’s words inspired the entire installation: “I’m not even sure I really exist. I am all the books I have read.” On a 30-foot-wide strip of LED subtitle screen embedded in one of the bookshelves, phrases from 250 books were displayed throughout the day, accompanied by a recording of the artist’s voice reading them aloud. It was a moment of shared knowledge and collective affabulation, connecting humanity past, present and future through the need for storytelling, an essential part of how we elaborate meaning and interpret the nature of our time-bound, physical existence. At the same time, it opened a passage into mythological and mythical realms that link us to the universal and the eternal. That “Otherworld” adjacent to the daily domain of facts and figures is also the primordial energetic center of meaning, the place of pre-linguistic and pre-ideological origins and the endless open field where imagination flows freely enough to contemplate essence and truth beyond the provable and measurable world, far beyond the illusory, performative spectacle of contemporary virtual stages. Books here revealed their timeless role as soulful vessels, portals through which time-bound daily existence and the redeemed, universal realm of the eternal can meet.

Devlin’s presentation continued with a site-specific Reading Room inside the Faena Cathedral that heightened the sense of sacrality, as well as a series of the artist’s more intimate, poetic, layered drawings and painted glass works in the Faena Project Room that suggested the full range of possibilities offered by this attuned, freely roving exploration of imagination.

A special dinner hosted by Chase Sapphire for Chase Sapphire Reserve cardmembers ahead of the opening further activated Devlin’s installation, in a memorable moment where deep philosophical reflections combined with genuine human connection and exchange. With a menu designed by Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, each course of Faena Art’s The Edible Library dinner was a translation of a quote from one of the books into food. Devlin gave Mallmann a series of phrases from the most potent books within her library to translate into a sequence of dishes, asking him to make the library edible.

After each course, the seating rotated, encouraging a new encounter and exchange with a stranger who feels immediately closer once united in such a moment of beauty, poetry and convivial sharing, as Devlin and Mallmann recite each text and dish. “It is a dinner where guests eat ideas and revolve to encounter new dining partners across the table for each course,” the artist told Observer, noting how projects on this scale require bold, innovative and trusting collaborators and commissioners. “As you sit at the circular reading table, you will encounter a series of books and a sequence of people who revolve into your orbit and then rotate out again,” she added. “Perhaps your perspective will have been influenced in the interim by the encounters you may have had with other books, other people, phrases you’ve heard being read aloud, a view you’ve had of the sunset, the sea, the city or a seagull.”

Ultimately, the Library of Us asked us to stop and to be present; to be aware of the thoughts, the sensations and the meaning within us;and to recognize how these constant acts of interpretation shape our understanding of reality far more profoundly than any passive absorption of content from an endless stream.

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