Alfabeti / Alphabets is the title of issue 1/2026 of La Biennale di Venezia Magazine published by La Biennale di Venezia after fifty-three years of editorial silence. The October 2024 inaugural issue − Diluvi prossimi venturi / The Coming Floods − has then been followed by four more in 2025, reinstating the quarterly schedule of the original project.
Conceived and produced as a printed edition, the Magazine stands out for the multiplicity of languages and freedom of expression, that allows graphic experimentation and cross-fertilisation between different forms and codes. The rich iconographic apparatus that draws largely from the Historical Archive of La Biennale and from national and international photographic research is a distinguishing trait of this publication.
The first 2026 issue gathers several articles, testimonies, interviews, dialogues and original and exclusive contributions by artists, scholars, and leading figures in the cultural landscape and civil society from Italy and abroad on a single topic: the word.
As stated by the director Luigi Mascheroni, “the linguistic bond that held generations together has been broken: today’s society appears as a collection of incommunicable monads. And so, here is the challenge: art and thought must once again speak to everyone, in a world where the word appears fragmented, abandoned, emptied of its generative character. How can this be done?”
The contributions for issue 1/26 are by: Gilles Kepel, Giorgio Marrapodi, Frédéric Bonnaud, Valeria Della Valle, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Tommaso Santambrogio, Ermanna Montanari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Visar Zhiti, Line Langebek Knudsen, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Luca Valtorta, Letizia Michielon, Debora Rossi, Cesare Pietroiusti, Valentina Casali, Angela Guzman, Keith Broni, Maria Luisa Frisa, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Christopher Hampton and Monica Capuani, Sonia Folin, Silvia Pareschi, Emma Dante, Silvio Ranise and Nicola Grandi, Tsai Mingliang, Gabriele Mainetti, Tomaso Binga, Manuela Furnari, Peter Joch.
The cover is illustrated with Hépérile éclaté (1953), a work by Raymond Hains and Camille Bryen, exhibited at the mostra di poesia concreta organized by La Biennale di Venezia in 1969. On the flap there is the Project for the poster of Le Bal Miró, The Light Bird, created by Joan Miró for the ballet-pantomime by Sylvano Bussotti at the Biennale Musica 1981.
The issue is illustrated with photographs from: Fototeca Arti Visive, Fototeca Cinema, Museo dei Quaderni di Scuola, Fondazione Antonio Presti, Archivio Cesare Pietroiusti, Video Data Bank della School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Coppi Barbieri, Fondazione Festival dei Due Mondi, Maria Laura Antonelli – AGF, John Baldessari, Jutta Benzenberg, Andrea Bianchera, Luciano Caruso, Paolo Conte, Luca De Santis, Elio Di Pace, Massimo Fiorentini and Marco Caselli Nirmal, Rosellina Garbo, Jenny Holzer, Franco Lannino, Carmine Maringola, Verita Monselles, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andrea Pirrello, Luo Qi, Italo Rondinella, Emanuele Scarpa.
The graphic design and layout are by Studio Tomo Tomo, Milan.