LIBRARY OF US
—ES DEVLIN
A 50-FOOT REVOLVING LIBRARY AND LUMINOUS READING ROOM THAT TRANSFORM THE FAENA DISTRICT INTO A TEMPORARY SOCIETY GATHERED IN READING, REFLECTION, AND ENCOUNTER.
Library of Us is a 50-foot-wide rotating triangular bookshelf containing 2500 books including the texts that have influenced Es Devlin’s thinking, life and practice. The illuminated triangular sculpture rotates like a mirrored compass needle within a circular reflecting pool surrounded by a 70-foot- wide collective reading table, set daily with Devlin’s personally annotated books that viewers are invited to read as their seats revolve around one another. Each day, Devlin sets the reading table with her annotated, margin-scrawled books. On the outside circumference of the table there are static stools so visitors can sit and read. On the inside circumference the stools revolve slowly with the rotating bookshelf, allowing visitors to encounter a new text and a new face with each degree of rotation. One of the shelves in the revolving bookshelf is filled with a 30’ wide strip of LED subtitle screen. Throughout the day, phrases from 250 texts are illuminated on the screen accompanied by a recording of the artist’s voice reading them, underscored with compositions by British composers Polyphonia.
The artwork is an evolution of Devlin’s recent Library of Light installation at Pinacoteca di Brera with Salone di Mobile in Milan, Italy earlier this year. It reflects the artist’s reading of Umberto Eco’s phrase: Books are the compass of the mind, pointing toward countless worlds yet to be explored, and Jorge Luis Borges’ words: “I am not sure I exist actually, I am every book I have ever read, as well as those of James Baldwin: It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” Es Devlin has said “I have always experienced libraries as silent, intensely vibrant places where minds and imaginations soar, while clutched like kites by their seated bodies. I sense the synaptic connections being forged, the resonances and associations at play within the minds of a temporary community of readers. This installation seeks to express the vitality of the library through a series of encounters between viewers revolving to meet one another through language around a circular collective reading table. Library of Us is a community of books, peacefully sharing one slowly revolving bookshelf, all silently beaming their contrasting points of view, all allowing for the other to exist, as they turn together between the sun, sea and sky.”
