Milan – We met a New York, a Williamsburg to be precise, the young and creative neighborhood of Brooklyn, to tell us a story that began in Milan and ended (in the best way) in the “Living Room” of the city where Gabriel Rossi and Emiliano Ponzi they found America. Not alone of course, because Rossi and Ponzi They are two members of a group, the Salotto, which includes other professionals, including art directors, illustrators, graphic designers, Italian video makers. And they tell us the story.
GR “I have a company that employs 30 people in Milan, the headquarters are in NoLo, it’s called Accurat and it’s inside a former 19th-century factory. I co-founded the company in 2011, one of the partners had the opportunity to do her doctorate here in New York, so we moved, initially also out of curiosity. Then a whole new world opened up to us. We mainly deal with making data usable through design, animations and graphics to make them intuitive and readable. We also make business intelligence software, large companies also make decisions based on reading the data, imagining possible scenarios”.
EP “I lived in Milan until a few years ago. I’m an illustrator and when I started working for Le Monde, Internazionale, the New York Times and the New Yorker I was in New York for three or four months a year. Every time I came here to New York I found very fertile ground, that is, I was able to implement projects that I couldn’t realize in smaller markets. So I made the decision to move. Illustration remains my training and my first love, I’m doing a very large project for the New Yorker to accompany an investigative journalism investigation with multimedia and video content. The second soul is the installation aspect: I have a group show opening in Shanghai, I designed an immersive room with timed lights in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai. And the third soul is that of painting, I’m doing a work with the publisher Corraini, a member of the Salotto”.
How did the idea of working together in the Salotto come about? (In addition to Accurat and Ponzi, Design Group Italia also moved to the “Salotto”)
GR and EP: “The idea came about quite spontaneously during Covid because we were all left without an office and without places to go. We rented a big house in the Hudson Valley with our families and after two weeks working together in the same place we had a great time. Two of us lived above an empty shop and when we returned to New York, after the pandemic, we had the idea of replicating this experience. We rented the shop, we made it a sort of coworking space between friends. Since we are all connected on the design and art scene in New York, there is also a director and a videomaker in the group, when we were having parties in the office we realized that a “design community” was being created anyway. When the owner of the building evicted us we said to ourselves “let’s cultivate this community” and we got a bigger space, here in Williamsburg, then one thing led to another”.
An installation from Fuorisalone
What do you offer in the Living Room?
GR and EP: “We present books, conferences, lessons, we have united the world of design, culture, events, music, art, a sort of landing in New York for Italian culture and in general events also linked to our activity. This opportunity of the Salotto is more than just the sum of the individuals, it is easier to work if your deskmate has a very high level of professionalism and similar to yours”.
Difference between working in Milan and New York?
GR “They are two different worlds, here the attitude that people who work in various sectors have makes everything much easier. In America you do business, there is a mentality that makes transactions easy in general, you tend to trust more what you don’t know, in Italy there is more im
An illustration of Ponzi
mobility and distrust if you don’t know. People in the workplace are valued well for how cautious they are; here, however, you are valued well for how many risks you are willing to take. Here, managers say: “Are there new people? Let’s see what they can do”. The work I found in Italy, I found because they trusted us here. Italian companies trusted us when they saw that we worked with Google, the United Nations, JpMorgan. The other side of the coin is that the market here is ruthless: with the ease with which you enter, someone else takes your job. So it’s a market that keeps you on tenterhooks, you always have to offer excellent quality and know how to renew yourself because you work with entities that have the size and critical mass to influence global culture. I really love Milan, I like going back there, but I really love the dynamism of New York and I think that if we hadn’t opened the company here in Italy, I would probably have already closed it (ride)”.
EP“What Gabriele said is all true, he was the yin, I am the yang. Living here, the thing you understand right away is that there is a pact that you make: you have access to many things, but you pay a very high price – not just financially – to live in New York, but the subtext is not seen because America, after the Catholic Church, is the largest advertising agency in the world that has ever existed. There is a “moral” pact which is knowing that you live in a society that in its foundations is set up to generate money and spend that money, so this American society is set up to make people who are already well off feel good. So being here is a game and you have to stay within the rules. If you arrive with a bang, American society welcomes you and helps you to launch yourself, but in helping you it is still ruthless”.