The Salone del Mobile seen through Gianluca Vassallo’s viewfinder

“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."