Ace Devlin our library is one of Miami Art Week’s undeniable Instagram hits. Yet despite the hype, the installation conceived by the artist for the annual Faena Miami Beach Art Project may be one of the most successful examples of public art we’ve seen in Miami, especially compared to the many monumental but ephemeral installations installed to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach in recent years, which have hindered the city’s fragile natural and community ecosystems and left a huge waste of money and materials.
Standing on the white shoreline from December 1 to December 7, the work is a 20-foot-tall, 50-foot-wide triangular rotating library housing 2,500 books that have shaped the artist’s philosophy, life, and practice. These books also represent humanity’s broader efforts to understand and explain the world, the nature of time, and the nature of reality. Beneath the mirrored artwork, a 60-foot pool casts endless reflections, suggesting the infinite proliferation of this treasure trove of knowledge, far beyond the limits of human life.
What Devlin has created is a truly public space for sharing human knowledge and experience. At a 70-foot-wide reading table, visitors are invited to read, reflect, and exchange ideas while seated on a slowly rotating platform that gently imposes another rhythm, a pause in time that encourages meditation and contemplation. One can immerse oneself in a book or simply soak in the natural beauty that surrounds it, especially at dusk, when the sun sets and Devlin’s library is silhouetted against a sky that changes from pale pink to purple, briefly burning into red before disappearing into darkness before turning to starlight. The entire experience invites us to be present, both physically and spiritually, before and beyond the relentless, distracting flow of information and misinformation that, when overexposed, often leaves behind far less than a page of a book or a truly human interaction can provide.
As the artist explains, the installation is about “seeing through the eyes of others.” The library contains books by 2,500 authors, each of whom offers a different perspective and a unique angle on our world, society and reality itself. Gathered together within this monumental building, they form a tangible, palpable archive of human knowledge and imagination, in stark contrast to the accelerated fragmentation, dematerialization and frequent voids of meaning produced by the infinite availability of content. In this boundless flow, knowledge is often decontextualized, synthesized, and compressed to the point of losing its original essence and, more importantly, the meaning that emerges through the connective tissue between ideas.
What remains is the flattening, rapid obsolescence, and dissolution of the human and cultural depths from which knowledge originates, especially as its circulation, articulation, and production increasingly rely on digital intelligence technologies. But even AI is constantly being trained and nourished by the vast knowledge base that humans have accumulated over time, and will only continue to grow with this type of input, if not drift outward as a simple illusion.
Jorge Luis Borges’ words inspired the entire installation: “I’m not even sure I really exist. I am all the books I read.” Embedded in one of the bookshelves is a 30-foot-wide LED marquee screen that displays 250 phrases from the book throughout the day, accompanied by a recording of the artist reading the phrases aloud. It is a moment of shared knowledge and collective friendship that connects humanity’s past, present and future through the need to tell stories, an essential part of how we articulate meaning and explain the nature of our time-bound physical existence. At the same time, it opens a passage into the realm of myth and mythology, connecting us to the universal and the eternal. The “other world” adjacent to the everyday realm of facts and figures is also a primordial energy center of meaning, a place of pre-linguistic and pre-ideological origins, and an endless open realm in which imagination flows freely, contemplating essences and truths beyond the demonstrable and measurable world, far beyond the illusory, performative spectacle of the contemporary virtual stage. Books here reveal their eternal role as containers and portals of the soul through which time-bound everyday life and the universal realm of eternal salvation are encountered.
Devlin’s lecture continues in the site-specific reading room within Feena Cathedral, which enhances the sense of the sacred, and in a series of more intimate, poetic, layered paintings and stained glass works created by the artist in Feena Project Room, suggesting the full range of possibilities offered by this coordinated, free-roaming exploration of the imagination.
A special dinner prior to the opening further activated Devlin’s installation, combining deep philosophical reflection with genuine human connection and exchange in an unforgettable moment. The menu for Faena Art’s “Edible Library” dinner was designed by Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann, with each course translating a quote from one of the books into food. Devlin gave Mallman a series of phrases from the most influential books in his library, translated into a series of dishes, and asked him to make the library edible.
After each course, seating is rotated, encouraging new encounters and conversations with strangers, and as Devlin and Mallman recite each text and dish, they are united in such a moment of beautiful, poetic and joyful sharing that instantly feels closer. “It’s a dinner party where guests taste creations while meeting new dining companions at the table with each course,” the artist told the Observer , noting that a project of this scale requires bold, innovative and trustworthy collaborators and commissioners. “When you sit at a circular reading table, you encounter a series of books and a series of people who come into your orbit and then spin out again,” she added. “During this time, your perspective may be influenced by your encounters with other books, other people, phrases you hear read aloud, sunsets, seas, cities or seagulls you see.”
final, our library We are asked to stop and be present; to be aware of the thoughts, feelings, and meanings within us; and to recognize how these constant acts of interpretation shape our understanding of reality more profoundly than passively absorbing a steady stream of content.
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