A continuum between the Salone del Mobile and Milan, Comunità Continua is a photographic project that shines the spotlight on the people who make up the creative community of Milan and beyond. From designers, architects and journalists to entrepreneurs, press officers, as well as those who live in the city all year round, Gianluca Vassallo’s project is dedicated to the people who bring Milan alive during design week.

The 2024 project will cover the entire duration of the event,’ shares Maria Porro, president of Salone del Mobile. ‘Parts of this great ‘sociological’ survey will be published along with the first Annual Report of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, due out next autumn. The Report will be the first tangible result of the research project entrusted to Milan Polytechnic University, with which the Comunità Continua has a common thread: the world of design.’

‘They are almost always referred to as photographs, but for me they are relational processes in which in which photography is a documentary asset,’ adds Gianluca Vassallo. ‘Driving it all is a fundamental question: What is a city? An easy question to ask, but its complexity has intrigued the human and social sciences, from Georg Simmel to Marshall McLuhan right up to the present day, with Marc Augé, Derrick de Kerckhove and Zygmunt Bauman in a production of meaning that has enveloped cities in myth, shame, pride and rationality, but in which social bodies, the ones that we like to call communities, have always maintained a centrality in terms of the mutation of the dynamics of coexistence.’

‘The relationship between Milan and the Salone del Mobile is incontrovertible, but the point for me is whether the Salone is not in itself an intercontinental city, a ‘continuous community’ that forms inside another for a brief, highly anticipated time, multiplying the ability to produce processes, meanings and change. The ‘Comunità Continua’ was therefore born of the idea for a register of relationships between a foreign body, my own, and that of the individual inhabitants of Milan’s design community, first, and then that of the ‘intercontinental city’ that becomes a part of it during the trade fair period. They are almost always referred to as photographs – and perhaps that’s all they are. Or perhaps they are what we allow them to be.’

Photography by © Gianluca Vassallo – Salone del Mobile.Milano featuring Francesca Celato, Entrepreneur, Comunità Continua: a research project by Gianluca Vassallo for Salone del Mobile.Milano

Address:

Comunità Continua 

15^th April  / Isola and Piazza della Scala
10:00 – 16:00 
Piazza Tito Minniti  
17:00 – 20:00
Piazza della Scala 

16^th – 21^st April   
10:00 – 18:00 
Salone del Mobile.Milano
Fiera Milano, Rho