futuraseoul.org.en

For many years, Es Devlin has explored the idea of Presence. To her, presence is not simply a matter of being here and now. It is found in voices revived through books, in encounters with others reflected in a mirror, in the sense of time revealed through light and nature, and in the awareness that we share one world with life beyond the human. Her work is rooted in these moments when relationships between different beings make presence tangible.

Born in the United Kingdom, Es Devlin began her career designing opera and theatre productions before creating some of the defining visual spectacles of our time, from performances for celebrated musicians to the Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime Show. Since 2016, she has expanded this language of space into museums and public realms. For Devlin, the audience is not simply a viewer, but a "Temporary Society"—a community formed through sharing the same space and time, and through the relationships that emerge from that shared experience.

3rd Poem: Es Devlin, Come Home Again is the third chapter in FUTURA SEOUL's ongoing series, One Hundred Poems. While the first two poems immersed the space in darkness, this exhibition welcomes natural light into the museum for the first time. As daylight enters, the building's curved architecture and the passing hours become part of the work itself. The space is no longer a backdrop, but the protagonist of this poem. Es Devlin describes it as "a poem written in the language of light."

The journey begins in a small library. Voices revived through books lead to encounters with oneself and others in a mirror, then unfold into a landscape where a single beam of light intersects with the rhythms of nature. Hundreds of sketchbooks come together to form a moving image, and fragments of that image are carried away by visitors as seeds for new reflections.

Come Home Again, newly created for Seoul, weaves together the living species of London and Seoul into a shared landscape, reminding us that a city, too, is a home inhabited by countless forms of life. Visitors become part of the work by reading, listening, and leaving their own traces.

At the end of the journey, the space opens onto a garden. Reflected upon the water, the garden and the fading light mark the day's final passage. There, we come to recognize that we, others, and the more-than-human world all share the same home. It is, once again, the journey home.

‘Dome’ originally meant a home. The work invites us to see, hear, and feel our home, our city as an interconnected web of species and cultures; to learn and remember the names and sing those under threat into continued existence.

The work echoes the invitation invoked by the 92-year-old climate activist Joanna Macy:

“Now it can dawn on us: we are the world knowing itself. As we relinquish our isolation, we come home again… we come home to our mutual belonging.”

We are losing languages as fast as we are losing species: the diversity of the ethnosphere is endangered in parallel with that of the biosphere.

A cinema screen is formed of hundreds of sketchbooks. The sketches have been made over the past 35 years: some are drawings of London species, some drawings of my kids, lots of process drawings - traces of me trying to work out ideas or share them with collaborators.

Using fragments of a film that I made with the dancer Dam Van Huynh in 2008, he is now portrayed dancing with his 18-year younger self. At the end of the film, the audience is invited to take a single sketch, a fragment of the screen, away with them.

The work continues after the viewing experience has ended. The audience is invited to take a single sketch away with them. Like a seed, the hand-drawn image leaves the artist’s studio and travels into their own lives and spaces, becoming the starting point for new memories and reflections.