Pandemonium is the third issue of 2026 of La Biennale di Venezia Magazine, which resumed publication in October 2024 after fifty-three years of editorial silence.
Released to coincide with the opening of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, this issue brings together contributions not only from scholars, scientists, and artists, but also from film directors and professionals working across the cinematic field. La Biennale’s many disciplines – visual arts, architecture, dance, music, theatre, and cinema – engage in a “pandemonium” of original and exclusive contributions by leading international figures.
The issue examines the age we are living in: the age of parody. For centuries, humanity’s confrontation with pain and injustice gave rise to symbolic forms capable of processing the tragic. Today, however, this mechanism appears to have broken down. The tragic is no longer worked through but suspended and neutralised, transformed into a consumable surface; the sacred is imitated and inverted; language is emptied of meaning and stripped of responsibility. This is parody: not irony or playfulness, but the systematic reduction of reality to surface, the dissipation of meaning. “I am the spirit that always wills the good and always works the evil”: this line from Goethe’s Faust captures the contemporary logic of a world that presents itself as oriented towards the good while consistently producing the opposite.
Conceived and produced exclusively in print, the Magazine stands out for its plurality of languages and freedom of expression, fostering graphic experimentation and the cross-pollination of different forms and codes. Its extensive iconographic apparatus – largely drawn from the Historical Archive of La Biennale di Venezia and from photographic research conducted both nationally and internationally – is one of the publication’s defining features.
Among the contributors to issue 3/26 are Francesco Artibani, Davide Catenacci, Giacomo Biffi, Francesco Bonami, Gian Piero Brunetta, Maurizio Cattelan, Carolina Cavalli, Sara Cosulich, Maurizio Crippa, Rossana Dedola, Nathalie Djurberg, Declan Donnellan, Bruno Forzani, Cesare Bisantis, Gelatin, Carsten Höller, Francesca Amé, John Landis, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Alberto Manguel, Diego Marcon, Flavia Fossa Margutti, Flavia Mastrella, Fabrizio Porcella, Antonio Rezza, Debora Rossi, Julian Sasha, Mariagrazia Pontorno, Carlo Sini, Bernard Tschumi, Giovanni Damiani, Jan Zwicky, Davide Brullo.
The cover features a still from François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966).
The graphic design and layout are by Studio Tomo Tomo, Milan.