With a journey into light to better understand lighting design, Foscarini presents the book VITE, the next chapter in this self-titled multimedia project which provides a different understanding of the home through photos, videos and words.
Starting from May, VITE will be available in a book edited by Corraini which will speak to us about lamps through the people who live in the spaces that these lamps light up. This unusual and fascinating perspective highlights (pun intended) the relationship between humans and light, while taking domestic spaces and the outside world into consideration as well.
Presented in 2020 and selected by the ADI Design Index 2021, VITE is a journey which takes us around the world and inside real indoor spaces to meet real people. Flipping through the pages while guided by the artist, photographer and videomaker Gianluca Vassallo and the write Flavio Soriga, we can see that people are always at the center of the story and our eyes are drawn to the authentic, personal and imperfect spaces which are far from the glossy world of design.
There are no photo sets, perfect scenery or dreamy images, but only real homes which get lived in day to day. They tell their owners’ stories and, for this reason, are able to move us.
Located in 3 continents, VITE is a project which took more than a year-and-a-half of production to tell the stories of 16 real homes and their inhabitants who live in 5 cities: Copenhagen, New York, Naples, Shanghai and Venice. Today the project can be seen in the book’s pages but does not end there because it keeps on collecting and writing new stories.
“In the homes of others, there are stories and people,” explained the writer Flavio Soriga. “I couldn’t imagine a better job than this: being sent to various cities around the world to knock on the doors of a few happy strangers who let me into their homes and answered my questions. For Foscarini I wrote true stories about real people who live in fantastic homes, which are more or less normal, and looked these men and women in the eyes who I didn’t know moments before.”
VITE simply presents a different understanding of the home and the relationship people have with the city they inhabit. And it does so each time with a different light because “every time that a door opened of one of the people I covered in the last few months, I tried to find a specific Sunday from forty years ago at the age of six, which still exists inside me, I tried to find the amazement of that specific light I discovered in a brand-new home,” said the photographer Gianluca Vassallo, “which was nothing more than the light that I imagine passed through the lives of someone who lived above me”.
Because light, as Foscarini teaches us, not only designs spaces but traces the lives of each of us in an univocal way.
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