PUNTI DI CONTATTO. RESTIAMO IN ASCOLTO: BETTY SALLUCE ON SHOW IN MILAN
Art, technology, sport, and inclusion intertwine in Punti di contatto – Restiamo in ascolto, the exhibition by Betty Salluce presented by Cramum and the luxury design brand Gaggenau from January 27, 2026, and throughout the year in the heart of Milan. Curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, the exhibition is part of the official program of the Milan Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympiad, the multidisciplinary, plural, and widespread project that will animate Italy on its path toward the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (February 6–22 and March 6–15, 2026), promoting Olympic values and dialogue between art, culture, and sport.
Within the Gaggenau showroom, Betty Salluce’s photographic works enter into dialogue with the new user interfaces of the Gaggenau Expressive and Minimalistic ovens, generating an unprecedented encounter between artistic practice and technological design. At the core of the project emerges a shared reflection on rediscovering the other and empathy, understood not as moral abstractions but as sensory experiences that affect dwelling, living together, and the very way we relate to what surrounds us. In this sense, the exhibition pays tribute to the Olympic spirit by opening a precise perceptual field: contact as language.
The conceptual threshold of the exhibition is articulated through the famous question posed in 1974 by philosopher Thomas Nagel – “What is it like to be a bat?” – which affirms the irreducible inaccessibility of another’s experience. If the experience of the other remains, by definition, opaque, then empathy cannot be an act of cognitive appropriation; instead, it becomes an exercise in proximity, a practice of listening that does not force access but accepts its limits.
“If that question delivers to us the irreducibility of what-it-is-like, then empathy is not a cognitive property but an exercise in proximity: it does not force access, it refines listening,” explains Sabino Maria Frassà. “Betty Salluce and Gaggenau show that empathy is not only the key to the future: it is a real and concrete doing – remaining in listening in order to become something more. Empathy is not a one-way effort, but a generative practice: it opens new images and realities that are denser with meaning.”
An artist long attentive to the anxieties of the present and to stories of migration – winner of the Premio Acquisizione Cramum Reti 2024 – Betty Salluce arrives in Milan for the first time with a form of photography that rejects the pure frontality of the gaze. Her images are sewn: thread crosses the surfaces as a gesture of fraternity and responsibility, recomposing fractures, wounds, and communities. This is not a decorative intervention, but a practice that takes on the value of an ethical and bodily act.
In resonance with this research, Gaggenau presents an unprecedented user interface that translates the principle of proximity into technological language. “A sensor that welcomes presence rather than demanding it, and a ‘rising sun’ that guides the act of cooking from a distance,” explains Mistral Accorsi, Brand Manager at Gaggenau. “Not spectacle, but measure, elegance, and the profound sense of a way of living that is finally richer in its essentiality.”
The works on display are entirely new. For the first time, Salluce sews parts of the body into the landscape, working with photographic collages she herself has created. Fans, spinal columns, and rib cages are transformed into tactile cartographies, in which body and territory graft into one another. The choice to print on eco-leather is not a mere material effect, but a true metonymy of the epidermis: the grain absorbs the gray, rendering the image mimetic and essential, almost as if it were claiming physical contact. Photography thus goes beyond its condition as surface to become skin of the work, a place where thread marks the passage from vision to proximity, restoring a shared “we.”
At the zero degree of color – a scale of Salluce’s unprecedented grays – the works dialogue with Gaggenau’s new material lexicon: steel behind smoked glass, Onyx anthracite glass, and the lighter Sterling tone. In this chromatic reduction, memory and depth are deposited; the seams remain visible and, at the same time, make manifest the reasons for their necessity. Sewn photography thus takes the form of a secular ritual, capable of holding together what time and fear tend to separate. The landscape is no longer a backdrop, but the subject of empathy: bodies do not pose in front of the world, they graft into it, conform to its morphology, and become its fabric.
“The result is a ‘whole’ in which body, matter, and landscape are equivalent structures: the body is the envelope of ourselves; the earth is that of its core; the universe, ultimately, of all of us,” affirms Betty Salluce.
The work thus takes shape as a living practice of Olympic values and the Paralympic spirit: friendship as trust that opens to encounter; respect as listening to differences and places; excellence as shared improvement; the courage to expose oneself and the determination to re-stitch. Each image becomes a threshold, each gesture a bridge between intimacy and collectivity, memory and desire. Within the same weave, Salluce’s thread and the discreet light of the Gaggenau interface perform the same act: drawing closer without imposing. Command becomes invitation, visual feedback becomes sign, matter becomes a space that hosts. This is where art and design touch, in the promise of a more human environment, where what is technical becomes hospitality and proximity becomes a shared language.
“As a child,” the artist recounts, “during nighttime journeys I would look at hills illuminated only by the moon: in those lines I recognized human profiles, reclining bodies, presences. It was a game of the gaze, but also a way to feel part of that landscape.” An instinctive gesture that returns today in her research, matured through a direct and bodily experience of the Lucanian badlands, crossed, touched, and listened to until their fragility and memory were perceived as physical dimensions. From this contact arises the necessity of thread: embroidery, tied to family history and to a transmitted female knowledge, becomes a bodily act, a practice of connection, care, and suture capable of making the wound visible. “Embroidering, for me, is a physical act.”
As Frassà emphasizes, “in these new works embroidery becomes synesthesia: not an ornamental addition, but a device of translation that transforms vision into touch and landscape into rhythm. The thread records a shared breathing – that of the earth and that of the body – rendering it legible as a weave of stitches, tensions, and pauses. It is in these fragile yet necessary thresholds, similar to seams, that Betty Salluce’s research is concentrated. Punti di contatto is the ideal place where the landscape ceases to be merely space and becomes presence, thanks to a shared ‘we’.”
Throughout the year, the works will animate the showroom, transforming it into a journey-atelier in which art and design interrogate the contemporary meaning of empathy. Punti di contatto – Restiamo in ascolto invites us to recognize, safeguard, and generate new points of contact: between body and landscape, between the desire to understand and respect for what in the other will always remain opaque. It is in this tension that empathy becomes ethics: not the claim to know “what it is like” to be the other, but the conscious choice to draw near.
From January 27, 2026 to December 18, 2026, at the Gaggenau DesignElementi Hub Showroom, Corso Magenta 2 (inner courtyard, intercom 33), Milan. Admission by appointment only, upon prior contact by email or phone (Mon–Fri 10:00–18:30). Email: gaggenau@designelementi.it ; Tel. +39 02 29015250 (extension 2)
