After selection for the ADI Design Index 2021, making the project eligible to compete for the Compasso d’Oro Award, an important new chapter begins in the spring of 2022 for VITE (LIVES), the multimedia production by Foscarini, with distribution by Corraini in the world’s finest bookstores starting in May.
Corraini and Foscarini have once again joined forces to distribute VITE (LIVES), a story told in images, videos and words to explore different interpretations of the home, the relationship with light, the link between life in the home and the space outside. The publisher and the decorative lighting brand share in an attitude of experimentation and constant research, as seen in the creation of the book-zine Inventario. Corraini will now also distribute the VITE project by Foscarini in the outstanding bookstores of its network around the world.
VITE is a fascinating publishing initiative with which Foscarini talks about light, starting not with the company’s lamps – the people who design, develop and produce them – but with the individuals who live in the spaces brightened by those lamps.
Presented in 2020 and selected for the ADI Design Index 2021, VITE (LIVES) is a voyage that takes us to cities in the North, South, East and West, inside real lives of real people – guided by artist, photographer and videomaker Gianluca Vassallo and writer Flavio Soriga. In the photo and video series, people are at the centre of the visuals and the narration, allowing viewers the freedom to roam vicariously inside personal spaces, real spaces that are approachable and imperfect. This time, Foscarini no longer looks at carefully controlled environments, « aspirational » images of photographic sets, but rather at homes that are lived in on an everyday basis, and close-ups of the people who dwell in them.
Developed on 3 continents, VITE (LIVES) is a project that took more than a year and a half of production, to explore 16 real houses and the people who live inside them, in 5 different cities – Copenhagen, New York, Naples, Shanghai and Venice. 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, hence the relationships with the different cities, each with its own quality of light.
“Every time the door opens to one of the homes I have been photographing over the past few months, I have tried to find a specific Sunday from forty years ago at the age of six, which still exists inside me. I have been searching for the wonder of that particular light I experienced — in a totally new home, with the smell of fresh paint to welcome us, and the sound coming from upstairs. Which was simply the light I imagined shedding a trace of evidence on the neighbour who 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 ordinary 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 digital copy of VITE can be freely downloaded at vite.foscarini.com
