Alla Carta is a biannual Italian magazine that was conceived to 'explore the social act of eating around the table through fashion, design, art and cinema.'
It's moved some distance from this in that the food motif feels more submerged, but the magazine is highly sumptuous in terms of the quality and quantity of the (conceptual or themed) imagery and its lush print production. If you collect only a handful from the current crop of truly interesting European fashion, culture and photography magazines, think about putting Alla Carta in the frame.
Here's the publisher's description for the latest issue, 'Blob':
This issue of Alla Carta is a blob, literally “a chaotic or random mass, a mess”. In this case, an indefinite mass of images, to all appearances lacking any formal rigour or consistency: the articles and interviews, in all their density, follow on from one another across nebulous boundaries.
It was 1989 when Angelo Guglielmi, historical director of Rai 3 (an Italian public broadcasting channel), and film critics Enrico Ghezzi and Marco Giusti created Blob, one of the longest-running television programmes on Italian television. The programme describes itself as follows: “Twenty minutes of surrogate television. TV disassembled, reassembled and laid bare by editing to reveal what the video and its everyday protagonists are actually telling us.”
The result may indeed seem chaotic, but certainly not random. Blob seems to evoke the technique of appropriation art, appropriating images from Italian television to give them new life and meaning. Quite the opposite of a mess. With an approach similar to repurposing, Blob reuses materials that have already been ‘consumed’—television quizzes, news shows, focus programmes—and re-assembles them into a frenetic collage that reveals the inconsistencies, absurdities and contradictions of Italian society and beyond, all with a certain irony.
In more than 30 years of programming, Blob’s ‘chaotic’ blend of images has, on the contrary, provided a highly detailed cross-section of social evolution and, more generally, how we represent it. This issue of Alla Carta walks the thin line between chaos and calm, visual disorder and the desire to send a careful and timely message.
