Es Devlin: all artificial light is ultimately natural light

PF: I am Paolo Ferrarini and this is Parola Progetto. Parola Progetto is a podcast of conversations with people whose lives are made of projects, where we explore design in all its forms, without objects or images, simply through words. And here we are. Welcome to the third and final episode of a special series of Parola Progetto dedicated to the culture of light, produced in collaboration with Salone del Mobile Milano and Euroluce. We are in Milan, and here with me is artist and stage designer S. Devlin. If you love theatre, art, or music, your eyes will surely have been delighted by her work. She has created public sculptures and installations at the V&A, Serpentine and Imperial War Museum, and outside at Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square, and Lincoln Center, as well as kinetic stage design at La Scala, at the Royal Opera House in London, and monumental illuminated stage sculpture for large-scale stadium concerts, Super Bowl halftime shows, and Olympic ceremonies. A major retrospective of Devlin’s work was shown at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York in 2023, along with an award-winning book called “An Atlas of Es Devlin.“ For this year’s Salone del Mobile, she paid homage to the spaces of the Brera Academy with “Library of Light,“ an installation that dialogues with space, the visitors, and the incredible books of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense. Hello, Es, welcome to Parola Progetto.

ED: Hello, thanks for having me.

PF: My first question, of course, is about “Library of Light,“ the installation commissioned by the Salone del Mobile in town. It’s a layered experience where visitors can simply take in the visuals, listen to live recordings, or sit down to read a book. Two of these three things, meaning listening and reading, are pretty unusual during the rush of Milan Design Week. Why did you decide to create a space where people are invited to slow down?

ED: Well, firstly, it’s an immense honour, of course, to be invited here to make a work in that extraordinary place. And like all projects, it begins really with responding to space. So, I had never been before to the Pinacoteca di Brera for my sins. I probably should have done. And I went on a huge exploration of that place. I went in at sunrise. I probably came out at sunset. But it felt to me like I’d been in there my whole life already. It’s so densely packed, right, with traces of light that have been captured in words, in paintings, in every art form, very densely stacked together in this Pinacoteca, this kind of chest of things. So, when I came away, I thought, “Could we take the inside elements that are stored so densely and somehow turn them outside?“ Could we populate this very rectilinear space, a quite austere space, with something that’s kinetic and something, as you say, that invites a pause?“ We also discovered Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who is the only female statue in that courtyard of very esteemed male scholars. And she, of course, famously designed a curve called the “Versiera di Agnesi“. So that’s one of the other reasons we wanted something in this form that turns and invites people to stop, consider this place, consider what it means, take a moment.

PF: You have a very deep love for books. Where does it come from?

ED: I guess you know, growing up as I did in the 1970s and 1980s, the TV had three channels. They didn’t start till 4 p.m. If you wanted to escape or to transport yourself or to be in another world or to see the world from someone else’s point of view, you read a book. It’s what we did. And then I became somewhat dissatisfied with my own quality of reading about eight years ago. I realized that that sense of being entirely lost and immersed in the mind of someone else’s I wasn’t doing it in the same sustained way because like all of us, I was constantly interrupted by the little friend in my pocket called the telephone. And I observed about myself that the time I was most concentrated in my reading was when I was working on a German opera because I couldn’t understand the German and I would be reading subtitles. And if it was an opera by Wagner, it might be four hours or six hours long. So, I thought what if we took away the opera, sorry Wagner, but what if we took the opera away and just invited people to gather together and just read together subtitles with that kind of concentration that you get in a place of collective audience. So that was the origin of these collective readings.

PF: And this is something that you do pretty often to take everything away and then build something up from the void, from emptiness. Is that right?

ED: It is. It’s the process when you are in a very, extremely, I think, privileged position of being invited to create a world. That’s what an empty theatre or an empty stadium or an empty art gallery is. It’s an invitation for an artist or a designer to create a rehearsal version of what the world could be. And everybody who steps through it is allowed for that time in the safety of knowing it’s going to end. For that short period of time, they can be an alternative rehearsal version of themselves. And they would never enter into that experiment if they thought it was infinite. It’s because it’s fiction, it’s because it’s going to end in half an hour, that they’re prepared to try it.

PF: Your very first memory has to do with lights and water, doesn’t it?

ED: I was very young. I think I was two. There’s some dispute about whether I was three or two, but I think I was two. And my father, who really worked in London every week, so he only saw us at the weekends. There were four children, and my mum was a teacher. She was very busy, and she said to my dad, “Look, can you just take the kids out for just an hour? Just let me get on with some marking, whatever she was doing.“ So, she took me and my baby brother, who was very little. He was like one. The one thing my mum said as we went out the door was, “Don’t let them paddle in the river.“ And my dad, of course, kind of moved on from that advice, and we did paddle in the River Thames, which was very near our house where we lived then in the outskirts of suburban London. And I fell in. And I was not there for very long. I wasn’t under the water probably for more than a few seconds, but I really remember it. I remember the colour of it. It was this beautiful, dirty, dirty turquoise colour, dirty grey, turquoise colour. I saw bubbles, I saw little rocks passing, and I saw this light and it took a kind of linear form, and I don’t remember being very scared. I just remember somehow thinking it was other, that this was other, that I was breathing in a way that was other. That’s all I remember. The fear did come after because I was very, very scared of the sea after that and the water, and I didn’t learn to swim until I was much older. I was very, very terrified. And I’m still somewhat scared of the sea. But yeah, I don’t know. I just remember the moment very clearly.

PF: It’s a sort of big void. Of course, water is empty, but it’s void at the same time with some light, which is something that you recreate very often. Empty spaces with traces of light or spaces that are filled with light where there are some dark elements that create this kind of contrast. It’s always this game of empty and full.

ED: It’s true, and I’m very interested in how we observe the sun, how we are in contact with, after all, the reason we’re here. We’re only here because there’s a sun. It happens to be our nearest star. It’s one of kajillions, but it’s our nearest one. And I guess all forms of light, whether it is the line of light that lands on my wall from my bedroom in the gap between the edge of my blind and the window edge, or whether it’s an absolutely newest LED pixel-controlled latest rock and roll lighting unit, or whether it’s a specific tungsten bulb or a bulb that’s made with sodium, I’ve become, I guess, somewhat fluent in the languages that different chemical and physical processes conduct as they create light. There’s so many different ways. It’s all from the sun ultimately though.

PF: Talking about memories, let me bring one personal memory to the table. It’s the first time that I encountered your work. It was here in Milan at San Siro Stadium during Beyoncé’s concert in the summer of 2016 for the Formation World Tour. I remember this gigantic cube that was very present also before the concert, of course, and at the beginning in that moment where you are waiting for the concert to happen, it turned red and it started to rotate and, in a way, time was setting still and the intro incredibly long for a pop rock concert, and I feel like time was still in that moment. More recently, in a Gucci exhibition, you chose to hide and reveal artifacts in a moving cube. So, what’s so fascinating about cubes?

ED: Well, I’m not very fascinated by cubes that don’t turn. Okay. I like the ones that revolve. And in fact, the piece at Pinacoteca is again a sort of conversation between a cuboid of this space and then this revolving tilted disk. I think in all of us, we hold our own memories of all the circles and squares we’ve ever encountered. And I think before that, at some level in our bones, we are in contact with all the circles and squares that have ever been, ever. And of course, all the circles lead us back to the planet and to the solar system. And you could argue that all the squares lead us to the human forms, the spaces of shelter, the architectures, the institutions, the systems that humans have overlaid around this planet. So, for me, the conjunction between those two archetypes of circle and square is fascinating. And whether that’s a circle revolving in a whether that’s a cuboid revolving. And then of course that’s step one. With the one that you described that we made in the Gucci Cosmos exhibition, this was a fascinating object and I’m still working with it because it breathed. It opened and closed its drawer. It was a breathing wardrobe and every time it breathed a drawer out, it was illuminated and there was the sound of a heartbeat and breath at the heart of it. And that really came from a phrase, Alessandro Michele, who was at the beginning of that process working at Gucci. We were talking about the nature of an archive. And he said, “The archive is at the heart of everything. It’s this beating heart.“ It was that phrase that set me off. But actually, that breathing box is really important to me as a gesture. And actually, the Pinacoteca is a kind of breathing box as well, revolving cubes. In a world where we’re so used to the illusion of cinema, of movies, of the moving image, which after all is just a series of rectangles revolving in the beginning around a film reel. If you are trying to tell a story and to engage the audience’s appetite for sequence, serial narrative, something that turns like a clock will start to weave an audience’s breath, heartbeat into a shared storytelling. But instead of being one that’s over there on a film; it can be one more like a campfire that’s in the center and weaves us in around it. We all become implicit in it.

PF: Something that is also very present today in live events, of course, is phones. And we’re talking about squares of light in a way that can be, I say from an audience point of view, very distracting, but at the same time I see the necessity maybe of using them to grab an important moment, an important memory. How do you feel about this new presence in live events? Has it changed the way you design the experience?

ED: It’s really interesting because there are two sides to it. On the one hand, one of the most moving concerts I’ve been to in that genre is Florence and the Machine. I didn’t design it; I was an audience member. And she very gently and kindly said to her very devoted fans, “Let’s not have the phones today.“ And she took us all somewhere. It was a very complete experience, a very focused experience, very communal. And I valued it greatly. On the other hand, what the phones do in terms of photography is they offer almost a kind of cubist trace of the work. So if in the future an algorithm, which I’m sure it will be able to do, gathered all of the angles, then you could, for example, replay a sculpture or a pop concert sculpture like a David Hockney unfolded expanded photograph, you know. And there’s something very democratic about that because before the phone, the artist singing could never see their own show. They would be shown like a few photographs and a few kinds of films if they’d invite it, but they never saw it from everyone’s point of view. It’s normally the artist who’s singing who will say, “Oh, I saw this clip online from this angle. Can we deal with that?“ You know, this is what this person’s seeing. So it’s quite helpful for that communality of experience. But I will say, turning them off is a great idea.

PF: Yes. Well, you know, sometimes they are part of the show as well because I’ve been to concerts where, I mean, people on stage ask them to turn, for example, the flashlights on and they turn all the lights down so the light comes from the audience, so it could be kind of also an interesting or fun experience, but… 

ED: I mean that’s so interesting, isn’t it? Because of course, when we were young, it was lighters, so we were all busy killing ourselves with smoking and damaging our lungs, but we had this beautiful mass flame in this kind of ancient bacchanalian way, but we were dying from smoke. Now we have the threat of the algorithms, and we’re holding these things up. Listen, there are many, many layers to it, I would say.

PF: Of course, as you were saying before, technology is always evolving also in live events. I want to talk for a second about the Sphere in Las Vegas. You worked with U2 for the opening act of this incredible project. I haven’t been there yet. I really wish I could go there soon. But I was wondering, is it like a point of no return for the evolution of live events? Because it’s not just about music. Do you think that this kind of technology has impacted and there’s no going back in live events?

ED: I think it began this sphere at a very specific moment of conjunction again between technology and poetry. And if we were to be specific, I would say 1965. Four young men from Liverpool had each experienced a very specific life, very specific pain, sensitivity, joy, all the sort of things that led them to need to write the poetry they wrote and the music they wrote and need each other in order to facilitate their project, right? And because it moved people so much and because it happened to be contemporaneous with the invention of TV. So, what you have is a generation of kids, a lot of young women with TVs for the first time in their living room, and they’re encountering with exceptional new intimacy. This poetry, this pain, this need, this joy, everything that was in that music. And everything’s in that music because of who those people are and because of what their lives were like, which is because of what the history of England was like and the history of the world. I mean, there’s many reasons why it all came to that moment. And then what happens is there’s an opportunity for the Beatles to go to America. And of course, because everyone’s already so intimately engaged with them from their TV, the number of people who want to encounter them is legion. So, it has to be in a stadium. This has never happened before. Stadiums are for sporting conflict, not for musical communion. So, they say, “Let’s do it in Shea Stadium.“ And of course, the expectation of the audience is that intimacy that they encountered on their TV. But the art form didn’t exist yet. It had never existed. So, the Beatles show up, the sound system’s not big enough, there is no audio-visual system because no one’s thought of it yet. So, the audience can’t hear the Beatles, can’t see the Beatles. The Beatles aren’t even really safe because of the extreme passion from these young women virtually and men expecting intimacy they were going to get on the telly. So, in a way, cut to the opening night at The Sphere, and you could say it’s sort of the ultimate medicine cure for that night in 1965 because the slowly emerging art form that is rock and roll, which I would say is still an incredibly young art form. So, if you go to a rock concert and think it looks a bit basic, give it a break because it was only invented in 1965. Give it a break. You know, operas had since, you know, the 17th century, and theatres had since, you know, 8 BC or whatever it is. So, you know, the form of touring rock and roll or touring pop music is relatively young. But over the course of its evolution, what it’s been trying to do is to fuse the image and the sound. And it significantly fails to do that most of the time. When you show up at a touring rock show, the first thing that really you’re looking at, if you’re really looking, is the evidence of 300 men having just left the building, having just been up very tall ladders, fixing the sound system, putting the lights up, because it’s only just arrived and it’s going to be packed up as soon as you leave. You know when you’re leaving a rock concert, and you see the guys coming out and they’re already taking it down. So, to fuse those two departments of sound and light in one piece of technology, that’s the first time it’s happened is at the Sphere because the screen is the speaker. It’s thousands of speakers, and they’re behind the screen, and we’ve been trying to do it forever, but this is the first time that the screen is the speaker. That’s the breakthrough.

PF: Yeah. And was it difficult to imagine how to use this incredible technology, or was it a dream come true?

ED: Well, I was working with Willie Williams, who’s U2’s creative director, and Stufish, who has been their designers for a long time, and with the band, who are really devoted makers and crafters of the visual, sculptural, as well as the music. So, we spent a long time really thinking about this and bringing to it everything that we learned from all our prior collective years of experience, probably two or three centuries if you add them all up that we’ve all been in these rooms making these things. So yeah, it started in a concrete place, almost like a Tadao Ando, you’re in this concrete and everyone comes in and goes, “Where’s the screen? I thought there was going to be a screen.“ And there’s a bird trapped in there. So, you see a little bird flying around, you see a helicopter come over and literally people who are quite well versed in design were saying to me, “What happens when it rains?“ because there’s a hole in the concrete dome. And they’re going, “Well, it’s when it rains.“ They genuinely believed. And they were saying, “Are you going to move this concrete to show the screen? When’s the screen coming?“ And of course, it is the screen. And then at the very beginning, this line of light that I saw when I was two- or three-years old splits this concrete apart. And then of course, because it’s U2, a horizontal one splits it apart and you know all of their spiritual Christian aspects are referred to and then it reveals the screen and actually the Nevada Arc was the finale. It was really the invitation from the band, from Bono who said, “Can we make this a cathedral, and can we devote this to what would have been there if we weren’t there?“ So there’s a part in the show where the sphere is unbuilt. You watch the whole sphere around you being unbuilt and then you watch all of Las Vegas being unbuilt. And you are back just to the desert. What would have been there if we’d never shown up? If the squares had never turned up and the circles had only existed, that’s where we get to. And we leave it to all the animals. All the more than human Nevadans fill the whole space as a cathedral to them. It’s quite moving.

PF: Wow. That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Is there any kind of light you’ve never been able to recreate on stage, but you wish you could?

ED: Every kind of light you can’t recreate. I mean, you can only make the light that’s chemically and physically being generated by those instruments, right? So the light of the sun, my favourite works are the ones that I do outdoors, which is why it’s a joy to work here in the Pinacoteca, and the other real joy is working at Bregenz. On the lake, it’s in the west of Austria, and it’s a big outdoor opera festival on a lake. You build a sculpture that will sit there for two years and for two weeks each year, operas performed on it. But whatever you put there and whatever the singers sing and whatever the composer wrote feels subordinate to the main act every night, which is of course the sunset. And that’s true when you’re doing a rock concert outside, and it’s true actually. I really observed it lately. I’ve been looking at sport, I’ve been looking at tennis, and I went to see some tennis. I hadn’t sat in a tennis competition like that, you know, a huge public major tennis tournament, and I observed that the birds were definitely commenting. There was no doubt. Literally, when people scored a point, you could hear the birds coming over chatting about it. I mean, maybe they were talking about something else, and they didn’t care about the tennis. But yeah, the light of the sun is obviously, I mean, it would be interesting to work with the light of Venus or Mars, you can imagine. I hadn’t even thought about it till you asked.

PF: Maybe you can do that at The Sphere.

ED: Maybe it’s safest.

PF: When you’re taking notes about light, do you find it easier to capture your ideas through images or maybe through written descriptions?

ED: That’s a great question. And it’s so true that the advice you get about writing from every writer, which is just to write. And I think Margaret Atwood puts it really well. She says, “A word after a word after a word is power.“ And you can only sculpt your writing once you’ve written something. And I do find, I think because of the way our brains have evolved, that I actually know what I think if I’m writing it down. You know, you get into this odd feedback mirror, don’t you, with your own writing. You write something that you thought you thought. And the minute you finish a sentence, you realize what you really thought. So, you change the sentence. So writing is a big part of my practice. Actually, growing part, the book that I wrote, you know, I spent a year writing “An Atlas of Es Devlin“ and the text in it. I really tried to stitch my practice, my use of light, my use of any materials into my time. I really tried to look back over 30 years of making work and to try and understand why I was making it in relation to what everyone else was making or to what was happening around me. But yeah, in terms of capturing light, I do a lot also with photography. I do have thousands of photographs of this one line of light at the end of my bed, sometimes with a pile of crap underneath it. I’m like, “Oh, this is amazing. I should move the rubbish. No, no, I’m just going to take the line of light with all the debris around it.“ I’ve been photographing the line of light on the wall in hotel rooms in my own house for about 20 years.

PF: Wow. Is it true that you have a countryside home guarded by lions?

ED: Oh, no. I have a farm studio, and I made a work in Trafalgar Square. And for that work, what I made was a copy of one of the lions that sits at the base of the column in Trafalgar Square. And I invited anyone to give it a word. And then we used the same algorithm that I later used for the World Expo Pavilion to broadcast the text vertically in a line up Nelson’s column with a collective poem. And it was really a question about if this lion who’s witnessed all those moments of rioting, protesting, but also celebration New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square, if this lion that’s been silent for 150 years could speak now, what would it say? When that project finished, they said, “What do you want to do with the lion?“ And this lion is huge. So I said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this new studio down in the farm. It’s basically a load of ruined buildings, but I’m planning to make it into a studio at some point.“ I said, “I’ll just put the lion inside this warehouse.“ Okay, we took the lion down there, but it didn’t fit. It couldn’t get its head through the door. A kind of basic error of judgment. And so, I said, “Okay, don’t worry. We’re just going to put it in these trees. No one will see it.“ But of course, that was when the trees were in leaf. And then come winter, all the leaves went away. And the train goes past this, and everybody sends me these notes saying, “I’ve seen this. It’s fluorescent red orange. It’s really bright.“ So yeah, it’s sitting there. I will have to move it.

PF: You grew up in a very artistic family, and you were used to making things. In a recent interview, you said a sentence that I really love: “We only ever made things to give to people as presents. So I learned that if you wanted to show love for someone, you made them something. So, I would spend hours making gifts for people I cared about a lot.“ Is this sense of gifting still part of your practice?

ED: Absolutely. And my children have adopted it too, you know. Yeah, when we were kids, the idea that you would buy someone a present if you were a child, like you got bought a present at Christmas, it was great. You had your Christmas list for Father Christmas, but you didn’t have any money. So you weren’t going to buy something. And you made something. And I guess that carried on when I was a teenager. I remember I had a boyfriend I was completely obsessed with when I was, I don’t know, maybe 16. And he went away to Australia, and I started making him an Easter present. But it took me so long that I didn’t give it to him till Christmas. But it was an egg, and I had blown an egg, emptied the egg, and then I’d filled it with wax to make it safe and solid so I could send it. And then I painted on it with like egg tempera thing. And then I thought it needed a box. So again, this meeting of the circular and the square, I made this perfect, you know, I thought clay box that was a cuboid with a perfect egg hole in it. And then I spent about three months painting that box. Then I wrapped the whole thing up and sent it to Australia. And of course, when it arrived, it was completely smashed to pieces. So I eventually joined this person in Australia, and I stuck it back together.

PF: Okay.

ED: And my parents still have it. But yeah, I think everything that you make is a gift to you to be able to make it, and it’s a gift passed onwards to those who can experience it.

PF: You are an artist who works with other artists. How do you align your vision with that of your collaborators? How does the conversation usually begin? Because it’s not something that just comes from you as a gift, but it has to be a dialogue. How do you start this dialogue?

ED: I mean, I think the word “converse“ probably means “to turn together“, doesn’t it? Conversare. It probably means “turning together.“ And I think collaboration works when you find a space where you can both turn and find the overlap of your two circles. It’s as simple as that. It’s like a Venn diagram. There will be something. There will be something that you are both interested in. There will be a way that you can align your paths of inquiry or find an overlap between them. Sometimes it takes a while. I’ve done some conversations with people who I thought were diametrically opposed to my point of view in all ways. And in a way, I do think in the climate we live in now of ever-refining circles of echo of our own points of view, the most important collaborations and the most important dialogues are with those whom on the surface seem to have nothing in common with us. There’s nothing more urgent than that right now. So, step one is to turn up in the first meeting with nothing. You must turn up with nothing. Because if you are collaborating and you turn up with, say, I thought we could do this, you’re already closing many doors that could have been open, I think. So, turn up with nothing to the first encounter and just listen and observe. And B, do wild amounts of research so that you know everything you can about this person’s batch of poems and what has been their path of inquiry so far. And then in that first meeting, there’ll always be something. Even if it’s, you know, there was one conversation I did lately with someone who I thought I would not agree with at all. And I found out in my research that when he was young, he’d set up a site which was about paper airplane making, about origami. And I found out he’d read the same origami book as me when he was eight years old. And I was like. “This is it. This is a hook.“ It’s like that.

PF: And I know you start to sketch when you are with a possible future collaborator.

ED: Often you have two pencils, one piece of paper, and the drawing gets done together. And that’s the best. But equally, if someone has an idea, you can draw it. You can draw what you think they’re describing. And the pencil sketches are, of course, really helpful because they allow each collaborator and the ever-expanding rings of collaborators that join the process to imagine what they want on a sketch because so much is left not there. And then at a certain point when you’re planning to actually make something, you need to, I think, show what it’s going to look like. A lot of the things that we want to make in my studio are pretty big and they are quite resource-intensive, they’re quite labor-intensive, they’re quite, you know, intensive of time. So, to take everyone with you and to also put it in mind, to make people imagine they’re already there and also to think about what’s going to happen to it afterwards. So, it’s not going to end up sitting next to the lion in my forest. Like what are we going to do with it next? This is always the big question. Can we conceive this thing to already have an afterlife? So nothing is single-use. This is critical in these things, you know. So, we do, I have a team of eight people in my studio. Some of them are architects, some product designers, some theatre designers, and they all have the skills which I do not have of Rhino modelling, 3D modelling, figuring out exactly what the dimensions of everything are, and then rendering in Cinema 4D, photorealistic rendering so everyone can sort of imagine themselves there.

PF: And how do you react when someone tells you “This can’t be done“? What’s your reaction?

ED: I mean you, if you’ve done the process right up till that point, then the “this“, the “this“ is not even a concrete thing. The “this“ that can or can’t be done is a gesture. And so if someone says you can’t do it in, you know, you can’t do it in this type of exquisite Italian marble, I’d say well, can I do it in plaster? And if they say you can’t do it in plastic, so what can I do in paper? You know, as long as the gesture is a truthful gesture and as long as the gesture retains its quality of observed, careful, you know, humble observation of life and is a truthful thing, then it can probably survive translation into any kind of medium. But the way you come unstuck is when you continue to pursue a medium that you originally envisaged when you can no longer really do it properly because of the constraints of budget or whatever. So you have to be prepared to jump and pivot quite quickly.

PF: How did you discover your calling? I mean, when did you realize that stage design was even a thing? And how did you understand that this would be your future?

ED: I think I was responsive to place, and it’s in my family to be honest. My mother’s the same, my grandmother was the same, my aunt is the same. They are ridiculously sensitive to place. So they will move the furniture around or switch different lights on, or it’s not about design really. It’s just feeling that certain rooms need certain medicine, that the room is part of the conversation, and you know sometimes you’ve got to give the room some food or give it a drink or you know give it new clothes. The room has personhood. The place has personhood somehow. I didn’t know that consciously. I’m suggesting that now. No, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I liked playing music. I liked reading and writing. I liked making artworks, and by the time I was in my 20s, people were slightly despairing that I would ever find. And I was very happy. You know, I had little jobs. I had a job in a bookshop. I was sometimes being a secretary for someone. I was quite happy just learning. I would read books. I would write down passages from them. I’d make things. And then at a certain point, people started saying to me, “No, no, you need to think about what you’re going to do. And you should do theatre design because you like all these things.“ And I was like, “Yeah, but I don’t really like the theatre.“ I didn’t really go. I mean, I’ve been a bit. I’d been to like a few Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, but that was it. I hadn’t really… I mean, I had started going, it’s not quite true, I had started going when I was a teenager. My mother started taking us to the English National Opera, and they had a really great group of people there at the time who were largely working in Germany. And German opera was so far advanced, German opera and theater in terms of design was so far advanced of anything that was happening in England. And the British designers and directors were bringing those German ideas into the English National Opera, a very specific period of time in the early 1990s. And I think I began to see what was possible. And I was taught by some of the people working on those pieces. And then I started to go and see different pieces of theatre. I started going to see Robert Wilson. I started to go and see Robert Lepage, Pina Bausch, all those things. I started to be alive to, okay, this is what it is. I just hadn’t encountered that stuff. Then I was hooked.

PF: And is there a specific kind of stage that you prefer? I mean, big, small, large venues, small venues, or as long as it’s a stage, you’re happy?

ED: Outside.

PF: Okay.

ED: In the mountains, on the sea, you know, being really trying to say, how do I make something that is worthy of being under this amazing sun, even if it’s pouring with rain? You know, that’s fine. I mean, it’s very difficult to make work outside. And then you have the perennial question of the scale and what are you going to do with these pieces? So, for example, in Miami in 2021, there was an invitation to make a big work in Jungle Plaza, the center of the design district. And I thought, what if instead of having this way of thinking where you make something then you figure out what to do with the bits? So, I said, “Well, why don’t we ask what’s needed first as a legacy?“ So, we went to a group called Million Trees Miami and they said, “We need this many slash pines, this many sea grapes, these many myrtles.“ They told us how many trees they needed for specific reforestation projects. So, I said, “Okay, that’s what’s needed. Make a work out of those pieces and have it temporarily, you know, on show and then plant it. A bit like these books, you know, these books are here temporarily and then they’ll move on. So that’s a new approach really.

PF: Does it come from a sense of what sustainability should be, or is it something different? This idea of giving a second life, a second chance to the things that you use.

ED: I think on the big work it’s no longer possible to show up and make something that’s just going to become landfill. It’s too heartbreaking. You have to have a plan for every single ingredient. Like where is it going to go? What’s going to happen to it next? And I think, you know, with the work that we did outside Tate Modern, it was called “Come Home Again.“ And again, it’s worth talking about the origin of some of these projects because they are by invitation. Said to me, in fact it was Cartier in that sense, said, “Will you make a work that celebrates Londoners?“ And I said to them, “Could I celebrate Londoners that are not human?“ And they are very visionary people, Cyril Vigneron and Kiyo Taga-Witkin said, “Okay, that sounds good to us.“ So I asked the London Wildlife Trust, “How many species are there of Londoner?“ If you had to guess, how many species of Londoner do you think there are?

PF: I have no idea. Hundreds?

ED: 15,000 species.

PF: Wow.

ED: Of which one is human.

PF: Okay.

ED: But the other 14,999 are not human. And that’s not counting the microbiome. That would be another 10,000 species. If we counted those, we left those out. So, I said, “Okay, I’m going to draw 15,000.“ I was like, “No, I’m really not. Let’s pick 250.“ And just the encounter with 250 species who are Londoners, they live in London. These are not like over there in the countryside on a farm. These are all the species who live in London. And just paying them attention. If you pay attention to things like that, which I just hadn’t, that itself was a legacy, I guess, you know, people every night to sing the names of the species, to listen to a choir singing their names. That’s a legacy as well, you know.

PF: How long did it last?

ED: It was 10 days, but we’re doing it again in various other places now. And even the work we made last year, ’Congregation’, which was portraits of 50 people who’ve come to London from displaced homes, who’ve been displaced from countries in conflict. Those drawings took me four months to do, and they were only up for exhibition for a week in the first one and then in the second for a couple of months. But I hope that the people who encountered them and their stories is a legacy itself, you know.

PF: Yes, it’s time for La Raffica! So, La Raffica is a classic segment of Parola Progetto. Raffica means ’burst’. This round features a rapid-fire set of 10 either/or questions. We’re looking for sharp answers, but there are two bonuses. You get one chance to pass and one opportunity to elaborate. Okay, ready? When you need to unplug, book, or theatre?

ED: Book.

PF: For your next holiday, seaside or countryside?

ED: Seaside.

PF: The best way to remember a live show, videos or photographs?

ED: Oh, elaborate.

PF: Okay.

ED: Talk about it. Tell someone about it. Describe it. That’s it.

PF: So using words again.

ED: Yeah.

PF: Great for Parola Progetto! I like it. Your ideal home, flooded with light or full of light and shadows?

ED: Light and shadows.

PF: The ideal setting to read a book, under a lamp or in natural light?

ED: Natural light.

PF: For a romantic dinner, moonlight or candlelight?

ED: Oh, both. They’re both great. Candlelight.

PF: Your ideal lighting project, a theatre tour or an arena tour?

ED: Pass. Because I like both.

PF: The best natural light for a home, sunrise or sunset? Oh,

ED: They’re both so good. I mean, let’s say sunrise because it’s the start of the day.

PF: It’s a promise.

ED: And you should be out at sunset anyway, you shouldn’t even be at home, so sunrise.

PF: Good point. The most beautiful light, sunlight or starlight?

ED: Oh, I’m going to say sunlight.

PF: You talked about the sun so many times.

ED: Yeah, I’m going to say sunlight. I don’t know how much light you get from the stars really; you get a little bit. I like more. Sunlight is starlight anyway, it’s just sunlight. It’s our nearest star.

PF: It’s a different kind of star, but it’s a star anyway. The last question for La Raffica. Natural light or artificial light?

ED: Natural light, come on. But artificial light is very good for telling stories.

PF: Yes, of course.

ED: All artificial light is ultimately natural light, isn’t it? It’s just us using natural resources to create light.

PF: So it’s still natural light. Perfect. Okay. Raffica, done. And for the final question of the podcast, could you recommend a book that has been important to you? One that we should also read.

ED: I recommend David Abram’s “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.” And David Abram is a big influence on my thinking. He’s a sleight of hand magician and a geo philosopher. And he wrote another book called “The Spell of the Sensuous,“ which is all about language. You’ll love it.

PF: Thank you. Thank you for the suggestion, and thank you for being with us today.

ED: Grazie mille.

Episode recorded in Milan on April 3, 2025, and published on April 15, 2025.
The transcription was carried out using artificial intelligence tools and subsequently edited by the author.
 
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