Such an unconventional approach to product communication should come as no surprise from a brand like Foscarini whose modus operandum is built on thinking outside the box: the company has no factory and no in-house designers, relying instead on an extensive network of small Italian manufacturing companies which means it can select the most appropriate materials and production methods to bring new ideas to the market, which in turn gives creative freedom to the acclaimed designers it collaborates with. In fact, VITE follows in the footsteps of other daring cultural projects such as Inventario, a magazine about design culture, Ritratti a photographic project that reinvented the standard product catalogue, and Maestrie a poetic documentation of the know-how of Italian craftsmanship. 

With VITE, forget about carefully controlled environments, meticulously staged photographic sets, and digitally enhanced "aspirational" images, as the project steps into the unscripted messiness of 17 real homes, shining a light on the people who dwell in them and their everyday life. “Taking cues from Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni”, says Carlo Urbinati, president of Foscarini, “I think what’s exciting about this project is the vantage point: our products are no longer the protagonist, people are”. Both Vassallo and Soriga spent the better part of a year getting to know the people whose domiciles they were privileged to be invited into, and the relationships they formed with them definitely come through in the series’ intimate videos, photos and texts.

“Every time the door opens to one of the homes I have been photographing over the past few months”, Vassallo says, “I have tried to find a specific Sunday from forty years ago at the age of six, which still exists inside me”. The videos are filled with such moments of unexpected revelation, where we, the viewers, recognize a shared gesture, habit, or even mood in the everyday life of the protagonists despite the fact that they live on the other side of the world. Perhaps you leisurely drink your morning coffee with you partner, like Carlo in New York, or hastily eat your breakfast standing up in the kitchen like Nan Lang in Shanghai, or maybe you like drinking a glass of wine on the balcony to unwind when you get back home from work like Lucia in Venice. “In the homes of others there is life, there are stories and people”, Soriga says, “I couldn’t dream of a better job than this one: to write true stories, about real people who live, like everyone, in stupendous or ordinary homes”.
 
Far from taking centre stage, the lamps in Vassallo’s videos and photos do what they were designed to do, provide illumination. This doesn’t mean that they go unnoticed or are unimportant; on the contrary, they are an integral part of the protagonists’ domestic lives. Lamps are the gatekeeper between night and day, they set the mood and create intimacy, they truly transform the spaces they illuminate. What becomes apparent in VITE is that their use is determined not just by the time of day and type of room they occupy but also by the everyday routine of their owners (how early they wake up for example), their living arrangement (Do they live alone? With a partner? Are there children?) and even the city in terms of daylight, urban development and culture.

By documenting a typical day in the lives of the protagonists - from the moment they wake up, to going to work, to returning home - and complementing the stories with their own words, VITE is a collection of intimate audiovisual portraits that explores the meaning of home, the unassuming but pivotal role of light, and the relationship between inside and outside, between life at home and life in the public realm. But perhaps the most meaningful takeaway is that despite leading very different lives, we all gravitate towards the same essentials: shelter, warmth, contact, and of course light.