Set Designer Es Devlin’s Major Light Installation Milan Design Week

MILAN — Es Devlin, the winner of three Olivier Awards and a Tony Award for stage design, grins when she recalls her early days in theater. She got her start as a magician’s assistant to Charlie Chaplin’s daughter, Victoria. “I had to put the rabbit in the hat.”

Throughout her prolific 30-year career — during which she has been a longtime collaborator of Louis Vuitton, overseeing Nicolas Ghesquière’s productions, and produced stage designs for everyone from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter to composer and pianist Max Richter — light has been the magic Devlin wields when expressing depth of emotion.

To kick off Salone del Mobile.Milano and Euroluce, the biennale of light, which open concurrently April 8, a testament to her mastery of light will be showcased in the 17th century Cortile d’Onore, which connects the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Braidense National Library and the Academy of Fine Arts.

Before an 18th century statue of Napoleon by Antonio Canova, Devlin will cut the ribbon on “Library of Light,” a sculpture formed by illuminated shelves containing more than 2,000 volumes donated by Italian publishing house Feltrinelli. The large structure, characterized by a rotating floor and illuminated surfaces, will be positioned in a layout similar to that of a sundial. During the day, sunlight will be reflected by slanted mirrors that close off the library, illuminating the columns and surrounding statues of the portico that have never in all the library’s 255-year history been penetrated by the rays of the sun. At night, its luminous structure will create suggestive shadow plays on the walls of the courtyard.

At the heart of the installation, reading is understood as a collective experience: the words of mathematician and theologian Maria Gaetana Agnesi will resonate through Devlin’s voice, blending with those of the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who will recite the words of Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s reflections on the concept of time.

Here, Devlin discusses her latest design project.

WWD: In all the 30-plus years that you’ve been working in fashion and music theater, where did your fascination with light begin?

Es Devlin: It’s interesting because my practice in light started when I was about six years old. We happened to have a very small space in our house underneath the stairs. There were four of us children, and we used it as a kind of studio. It was a place where you could make up your own rules and you could rehearse life as if different rules applied. You determined how much light there would be in that space: with torches, with little bits of colored sweet paper in front of the torch, with cutout holes and bits of cardboard. We had toy theaters and small projectors with our favorite cartoons. So the practice began then, and then I would say it developed through school theater.

WWD: You said your first job was working in magic at the Cirque Invisible?

E.D.: It was a very particular circus, and it was run by Charlie Chaplin’s daughter, Victoria Chaplin, and her husband, Jean-Baptiste Thierrée; he was a clown and a magician, and she was a dancer and an acrobat. They trained me…and I had to do about 80 different backstage tasks for each show: catch a thrown bunch of flowers, put the rabbit in the hat, put a goose in a cauldron, light a match, put up the tightrope, put down the tightrope. It was an extraordinary training, and I learned the beautiful dance of being backstage — how the magic is made. 

WWD: In 2023, in an 858-page book titled “An Atlas of Es Devlin,” you illustrated your career through pull-outs, cutouts, different textured papers, mirrors and full-bleed images that run across double-page spreads. What drew you to light and the art of working with light in the first place?

E.D.: I wasn’t ever particularly good at acting or anything like that, but I liked being in school after hours when it was dark and different rules applied. I liked the possibility that the rules that we live life by could change when the light changed. When I started to make theater in the 1990s, it was in very small rooms…in a room above a pub in West London, where the lighting designer would turn all the lights off and start to carve a vision of the object you had made out in light. So the telling isn’t really the object, it’s the way the object is presented through control of light. And then that expanded out to large-scale concerts and events in very huge spaces.

WWD: Salone del Mobile.Milano president Maria Porro has done a lot to infuse the worlds of film and theater into Salone and draw the attention to the masterpieces of Milan. How did you two come together on this project?

E.D.: I was aware of Maria Porro’s work. She also trained, as I did, as a set designer, in fact she trained at Milan’s Accademia di Brera in the Pinacoteca. We’d known of one another’s practice for a long time. Having worked at La Scala, having spent time in Milan, being a huge lover of the city and all its treasures, it was really a case of finding the right time and the right place to collaborate. 

WWD: What were some of the other things that you learned about the Braidense Library that you didn’t know that surprised you or endeared you to the space?

E.D.: If I had to pick one moment, it would probably be the discovery of Maria Gaetana Agnesi [the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university. She was also a philosopher, theologian and humanitarian], because I had no idea that this remarkable woman existed…and I’m probably not alone. And yet, having researched her life and practice that fused mathematics and spirituality, it becomes clear what an important figure she was of her time. 

WWD: There’s a lot of science behind what you do, the science of light. There’s so much engineering that goes into the projects that you have done, especially as they have gotten more complicated. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you became an expert in lighting?

E.D.: I think my approach to technology of any kind, or mechanics, or mechanical instruments of any type, is entirely led by my desire to feel something myself and to invite an audience to feel something. That is really all I care about. And as I progress through various media, I often encounter extraordinarily talented technicians or creative technologists or artists, especially in technology, who will be fascinated by the technology. And I find it very hard to get excited by a piece of technology until I have a project in which I want you to feel something. 

WWD: Your current project, “Congregation,” a large-scale choral installation you first created in partnership with U.K. for UNHCR, The Courtauld and King’s College London incorporates your work as a portraitist through continuous encounters with strangers, many of them refugees. This is very introspective compared to large-scale works you have made in collaboration with celebrated musicians.

E.D.: When I was making “Congregation,” quite a few people asked me: What’s the common denominator between this project and some of the large-scale concert works? And actually, to me, there’s quite a common thread between them. Because actually, when you sit with a lyricist, a musician, that music, those lyrics come from a very intimate place. And if they reach around the globe, it’s not because they are designed to reach the world. It’s because they came from a place that’s so closely and carefully and truthfully observed, and because that truth of observation of an intimate personal experience has been held close and protected and successfully guarded, while the parallel processes of magnification for mass reach have taken place around it.

WWD: You mentioned the same happens with music that you interpret through stage design…

E.D.: It’s the reason why you can stand at Glastonbury and sing [Adele‘s] “Someone Like You” with 200,000 people all weeping together: It’s not because Adele wrote that song to move 200,000 people. It’s because she wrote it because she had to write it, to express how she felt in that moment. And guess what? There are 200,000 people on any given day who have felt that too but didn’t know how to express it until that moment. So actually, in all of the work I do, there is close observation of life and experience, and careful expression of that observation, and it’s always intimate, and my job has been to express that intimacy at a grand scale. There’s no real difference in the intimacy that I felt when I sat alone in the studio making a chalk and charcoal portrait of someone as they told me their story of a difficult journey to the U.K. from a place in conflict: Most of the work that I engage in, at any scale, is based on truthful observation of a moment of intimate encounter.