A new perspective, an updated viewpoint, an evolution in the way Foscarini operates in relation to its products. The VITE (LIVES) project reflects the desire to make people the central focus, to talk about light not starting with the lamp but with those who live with it inside their own intimate space: the home.
The VITE (LIVES) project represents a new perspective, an updated viewpoint, an evolution in the way Foscarini operates in relation to its products. It reflects the desire to make people the central focus, to talk about light not starting with the lamp – those who have designed, developed and produced it – but about those who live with it inside their own intimate space: the home.
VITE (LIVES) is a voyage that takes us inside real homes – in Copenhagen, New York, Naples, Shanghai and Venice – accompanied by the artist, photographer and videomaker Gianluca Vassallo. People are at the centre of the image and the narration, while the gaze is left free to roam inside personal spaces, real spaces that are also thus imperfect. We no longer look at carefully controlled environments, the artificial and “unreachable” images of photographic sets, but at homes that are lived in on an everyday basis, close-ups of the stories of the people who dwell inside them.
“People who very patiently have made their spaces, their lives available to us, where Foscarini has entered on tiptoe,” says Carlo Urbinati, president of Foscarini. “What changes is the vantage point: the choice of the position from which to shoot the scene, as Antonioni taught us, is a moral choice, which indicates where you put yourself, how you see yourself in the world, the position from which you observe the world. In this project the product is no longer at the centre, because people are at the centre. It is a change of focus, a statement of principle. People are the ones who choose, and we want to be part of their emotional panorama, their domestic panorama.”
After having made room for design culture (with Inventario, a magazine completely free of any promotional logic), after having put the spotlight on design, transforming its products into personalities (with the project Ritratti), after having addressed the dignity of know-how of the craftsmen who make the products (with Maestrie), in VITE (LIVES) Foscarini expresses its taste for intimacy, moving through spaces where lamps produce the magic of setting the tone and transforming the space, becoming part of the everyday experience of life in the home.
Seventeen houses and the people who live inside them, five different cities on three continents, have been portrayed by Gianluca Vassallo and narrated by the writer Flavio Soriga in a project that has required over one year of production. The fundamental factor is the relationship that has developed between Vassallo and the protagonists of VITE (LIVES), and then between those people and Soriga, who has returned to those places to grasp the varying meanings of the home in very personal words, the aspects of relation with the cities, each of which has its own different light: the light of the North, South, East and West.
“Every time the door has been opened to one of the lives I have photographed across these months, I have tried to find Sunday from forty years ago, which exists inside me. I have searched for the wonder of that particular light I experienced at the age of six, in a totally new house, with the smell of fresh paint to welcome us, and the sound arriving from upstairs. Which was simply the light I imagined crossing the life of whoever it was that lived up there.”
Gianluca Vassallo
“In the homes of others there is life, there are stories and people. I couldn’t dream of a better job than this one: to be sent to various cities in the world, to knock at the door of strangers who are happy to welcome me and to answer my questions. To write true stories, about real people who live, like everyone, in stupendous or more or less normal homes. To look into the eyes of men and women I didn’t know one moment earlier. This is what I have done for Foscarini.”
Flavio Soriga
A project that develops through a narrative of images, videos and words, exploring the meaning of the home, light, the relationship between inside and outside, between life in the home and outdoor space, the city and its human and architectural characteristics, its atmosphere and history, personal and public, singular and plural.
A story with which Foscarini, with pride and conviction, evolves its viewpoint in a more authentic spirit.
The VITE (LIVES) project will be previewed with short video clips on SkyArte from Sunday 26 April 2020 at h. 20.10, and on Instagram IGTV @foscarinilamps.
