Over the centuries, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice has played a central role in the shifting tides of the city’s history—from its beginnings as an 8th-century church, to becoming a monastery commissioning some of the greatest masterpieces of the Venetian Renaissance, to being memorialized by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India as a byword for the genius of Italian architecture.
One thing San Giorgio Maggiore likely hasn’t seen before, however? The monastery’s refectory—with its reproduction of Veronese’s epic Wedding at Cana, the original of which was plundered by Napoleon’s army and now hangs in the Louvre—covered in floor-to-ceiling powder pink drapes. Described by its maker as “architectural ice cream,” an enormous mirrored banqueting table has been set up to run the length of the room, topped with everything from kitschy Meissen porcelain fruit bowls to translucent anchovies and stuffed courgette flowers blown from glass by the Venetian artisan Bruno Amadi.
The reason for the kaleidoscopic array of topsy-turvy objects on display here—enormous papier-mache cypress trees flanking the stairway to the refectory, for example, or the selection of Japanese and Korean woven baskets suspended from the ceiling of a nearby greenhouse—is the third edition of Homo Faber, a design festival staged by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship every two years. (The name aptly translates to: “man the maker.”)
This year’s outing is Homo Faber’s biggest and boldest yet, taking over a sprawling network of buildings within the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and broken up into 11 themed chapters—from “childhood” to “love” to “dreams”—that chart “the journey of life” through both objects (800 of them, to be precise, sourced from over 70 countries) and a handful of multisensory experiences, including live demonstrations from artisans.
The increased ambition can at least in part be chalked up to its curators this year: film director and interior designer Luca Guadagnino and his associate on the project, Milanese architect Nicolò Rosmarini. Quite where Guadagnino found the hours in his day to put this together remains something of a mystery—his prodigious output recently has included his design studio opening a hotel in Rome a few weeks back, wrapping a film with Julia Roberts in mid-August, and then staying on after Homo Faber to promote and premiere his latest film, the Daniel Craig-starring Queer, at the Venice Film Festival.
The appeal of taking on Homo Faber, Guadagnino explained on the day before the exhibition’s opening, was “the idea of dealing with something that I’ve never really dealt with.” After two of the foundation’s senior members, Hanneli Rupert and Alberto Cavalli, paid a visit to the set of Queer in Rome and proposed the collaboration, Guadagnino began to identify parallels between curating an exhibition of this nature and directing a film. “Creating a space that could hold together an exhibition of craft was immediately fascinating to me, because I think my job has always been to find a way to tell a story within the coordinates that I’m given,” he added.
In the case of Homo Faber, those coordinates must have been at least a little daunting. When walking through the exhibition spaces, which you could easily spend an entire day doing, the scope and ambition of the project is mind-boggling. To find a focus, Guadagnino explained, he and Rosmarini looked to the past—and specifically, the work of the Veneto region’s most celebrated architects from across the centuries, from Palladio to Carlo Scarpa. “I think this, for us, has been a tremendous experience of reflection on many of the great inspirations that have led our ideas of architecture and interiors,” he added. “But at the same time, we wanted to look to the future of craft, to the savviness of [makers today]—that, I believe, is the best place to be.”
That temporal thread allowed the curators to find a throughline across the wildly diverse range of objects and practices Homo Faber showcases: from the delightful 3D-printed ribbon sculpture by Studio Luca Guadagnino that weaves its way around the columns of the first Palladian courtyard you enter to symbolize “birth,” to the darkened final room that represents “afterlife” through dripping wax candles in an enormous, skeletal porcelain candelabra by Zuzanna Spaltabaka.
Along the way, you’ll find plenty of playful diversions: a room dedicated to “childhood” that is packed with remarkably intricate doll’s houses, animal figurines, and a delightful armchair by Seungjin Yang in an arresting shade of yellow that appears at first to be made from balloons, but is actually crafted from resin; or a series of rooms honoring the journey of love that culminate in a selection of objects celebrating its consummation, with a stunning installation by the Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed as its centerpiece, blending the motifs of traditional oriental rugs (here featuring a pair of lovers in an embrace) with something altogether more contemporary, as plumes of fabric burst out from the surface with an uncontainable, ecstatic energy.
Given the Michelangelo Foundation’s close ties to Richemont—the luxury conglomerate’s founder, Johann Rupert, is its chairman, while his daughter, Hanneli, is vice chair and one of the masterminds behind Homo Faber—there was a strong presence from the latter’s brands here too, although measured just enough so as not to overshadow the independent artisans whose work makes up the bulk of what is on display. (Demonstrations of the making of a Cartier Panthère bracelet, for example, were taking place in the “nature” room, while Van Cleef Arpels Lovebirds jewels from the 1940s were on display in the more amorous sections of the exhibition.) And for fashion fans, there’s what is arguably the exhibition’s most striking setpiece: inside a darkened space, an enormous, rippling pool of water—through clever lighting, made to appear almost like an oil slick—served as a backdrop for dozens of hooded Alaïa dresses in subtle gradations of color, their knitted velvet shimmering like specters in the moonlight.
Arguably most impressive element, though, was the sense of Homo Faber’s accessibility: the exhibition was clearly conceived not just to delight the design connoisseurs who were floating through its halls during the preview day, but also the wider audience the foundation is encouraging to visit by offering a free shuttle waterbus over from San Marco. (Given the highfalutin framing of many design exhibitions, this open-armed approach is rarer than you might think.) Homo Faber bills itself as a “celebration of contemporary craftsmanship,” and it’s the word celebration that feels most important here—it’s joyful, irreverent, and a party to which everyone is invited. The only hitch? The exhibition ends on September 30, so you’ll have to make it over to Venice soonish if you want to catch it. Rest assured, it’s worth the trip.
