The Salone del Mobile seen through Gianluca Vassallo’s viewfinder
“Comunità Continua” is the title of the project by the director and photographer, who documented the event, the districts and iconic places of Milan. Here we present his authorial images
At the 2024 edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano, filmmaker and photographer Gianluca Vassallo documented the most important international event for the design and furniture industry. “Comunità Continua”, the project’s title, is an authorial story that bears witness to the human transition that makes this time of year unique.
The artist’s gaze rested on the iconic districts and places of Milan and then moved, from 16 to 21 April, to the perimeter of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, at Fiera Milano, Rho, with six days of portraits open to all. The result is a choral narrative featuring designers, architects, journalists, entrepreneurs and press officers. And there’s more: the story also involves the people who live in Milan all the year round.
“After Lost & Roll, the photo survey that the Salone del Mobile.Milano commissioned for the 2023 edition of the Salone, the collaboration with Gianluca Vassallo continues,” comments Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano. "A second act devoted to the great community of the design system that enlivens Milan during the Salone and 365 days a year. The 2024 project covered the whole duration of the event. A selection of this great sociological survey will accompany the first Annual Report of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, to be issued next autumn. The Report will be the first tangible result of the research work entrusted to the Politecnico di Milano, united with ‘Comunità Continua’ by a slender red thread: the world of design.”
“Comunità Continua” is a veritable historic document that testifies to the value, influence and cultural significance of the Salone del Mobile.Milano. As Gianluca Vassallo put it: “They almost always call them photographs, but to me they are relational processes in which photography is a documentary asset. Everything is guided by a fundamental question. What is a city? A question posed with simplicity, yet its complexity involves the human and social sciences, from Georg Simmel to Marshall McLuhan and our contemporaries Marc Augé, Derrick de Kerckhove and Zygmunt Bauman in a production of meaning enveloping cities in myth, shame, pride and rationality, but in which social bodies, what we like to call communities today, have always retained a central role in mutating the dynamics of social comity. The closeness between Milan and the Salone del Mobile is self-evident, but the point, for me, is whether the Salone is not in itself an intercontinental city, a ‘continuous community’ that forms within another community for a brief, eagerly awaited period, multiplying the ability to produce processes, meanings and change. This is how the ‘Comunità Continua’ project developed, with the idea of keeping a record of the relations between a foreign body, mine, and that of the individual inhabitants of Milan’s design community, first, and then continuing with that of the “intercontinental city” that joins it during the days at the fair. They call them photographs, nearly always. And perhaps, they are nothing more than that. Or maybe they are what we allow them to be."