Photography Exhibition Cramum & Gaggenau : Betty Salluce – Points of Contact – Staying in Listening

Art, technology, sport and inclusion are the key words of Points of Contact — Staying in Listening, the new exhibition that Cramum and the luxury design brand Gaggenau present in the heart of Milan from 27 January 2026 and throughout the entire Olympic year.

Dedicated to Betty Salluce and curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, the exhibition is part of the Milano Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympiad, the multidisciplinary and widespread programme designed to promote Olympic values and foster dialogue between art, culture and sport, ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to be held in Italy from 6 to 22 February and from 6 to 15 March 2026 respectively.

Betty Salluce’s photographic works enter into dialogue with the new Gaggenau Expressive and Minimalistic oven user interfaces, narrating a rediscovery of the other and of empathy through art, design, and a renewed sense of dwelling and living together. The exhibition thus pays tribute to the Olympic spirit by opening a sensitive field in which contact becomes language.

“What is it like to be a bat?” The question posed by Thomas Nagel in 1974—revealing the irreducible inaccessibility of another’s experience—forms the conceptual gateway of the exhibition. If that question affirms the irreducibility of subjective experience, then empathy cannot be reduced to a cognitive skill but becomes an exercise in proximity: it does not force access, it sharpens listening. Betty Salluce and Gaggenau show that empathy is not only the key to the future, but a real and concrete practice—remaining in listening in order to become something more. Empathy is not a one-directional effort, but a generative practice that opens new images and denser realities of meaning.
— Sabino Maria Frassà, curator

Betty Salluce—long attentive to the anxieties of the present and to stories of migration (winner of the Cramum Reti Acquisition Prize 2024)—comes to Milan for the first time with a form of photography that does not merely present itself: it is stitched. Thread traverses the images as a sign of fraternity and responsibility, recomposing fractures and communities.

“In resonance with Salluce’s artistic research, Gaggenau introduces an unprecedented and pioneering user interface that practises proximity: a sensor that welcomes presence rather than demanding it, and a ‘rising sun’ that guides the act of cooking from a distance. Not spectacle, but measure, elegance and a profound sense of living made richer in its essentiality,” explains Mistral Accorsi, Brand Manager Gaggenau.

“What is it like to be a bat?”
The question through which, in 1974, Thomas Nagel revealed the irreducible inaccessibility of another’s experience is the conceptual threshold from which this exhibition begins. If that question affirms 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.
— Sabino Maria Frassà, curator

“As a child, during night journeys, I used to look at hills illuminated only by the moon: in those lines I recognised human profiles, reclining bodies, presences. It was a game of sight, but already a way of feeling part of that landscape.”
— Betty Salluce, artist

Betty Salluce

Betty Salluce (Matera, 20 February 1992) is a visual artist working between photography and stitched interventions. After attending the Carlo Levi Art High School, she moved to Carrara in 2014, where she studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts under Gianni Dessì, graduating with a thesis on the artist’s body as political and social denunciation. Since 2017 she has lived in Turin, working in the studios of Paolo Grassino and, from 2019, of Luigi Mainolfi. She has collaborated with Francesca Arri in several performances (Moving Bodies Festival 2018–2019; Choose Life, Polo del ’900, 2021). In 2020 she obtained her MA in Painting at the Accademia Albertina (supervisor Massimo Barzagli). In 2024 she won the Cramum Reti for Art Prize, entering the Paneghini Collection. She currently lives and works in Pisa.

Her research investigates time and identity: bodies and landscapes, often suspended in a still-image dimension, transform the speed of everyday life into silence, reflection, and listening. Stitching recomposes symbolic fractures, offering a glimpse of truth within an unstable present.