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\u2019s annotations\u2014and the inner seats rotate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve put books opposite each other that I think will make for an interesting conversation,\u201d Devlin said from her book-lined studio. \u201cThese shelves contain a multitude of non-aligned ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThere was always the anxiety on a Tuesday night: did we have our library books ready to return?\u201d<\/p>\n
She later studied English literature at Bristol University. She says the sound, etymology, history and meaning of words have become central to her work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree different books by unrelated authors can shape my understanding of how the mind works and how that affects life on the planet,\u201d Devlin says, citing the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. \u201cThat all feeds back into every piece of work I make.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014a process she likened to \u201ca parent marking the height of their children on a doorframe as they grow.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy children were two toddlers once and now they\u2019re two teenagers, but I really enjoyed reading to them,\u201d she says. \u201cBefore I had kids, I probably would never have read these books aloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Books in the lobby of the Faena Hotel Miami Beach are available for visitors to browse and read Photo: Liliana Mora<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Parsifal, she would read the opera\u2019s on-screen subtitles and wondered if that format could bring people together through shared text.<\/p>\n
Her first experiment was in 2018 with an abridged 24-minute version of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli\u2019s The Order of Time (2017), read by Benedict Cumberbatch. With Machiko Weston, she revisited the concept<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving done a few tests of this, I realised that people actually become quite focused when you read aloud to them,\u201d Devlin says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n She says the 250 books selected for special treatment are the \u201clodestars\u201d 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\u2019s multilingual audience.<\/p>\n