Have you ever thought of a PF based on pages of text?

We’ve had many different ideas… We found this project with Vogue an extremely interesting one and we had a similar experience in the past with Dazed & Confused. It’s not you that’s tearing pages from their magazines but them asking you to do it. This has pushed us to start editing a series of special issues. Now we’re working at one with Jakob Bolotin, a collector that has put together more than twenty years of articles from Italian and french popular illustrated magazines (like Novella 2000 or Gente), gossip articles et cetera… I think that if we ever will work on a Permanent made of texts they would have to be visual texts.

You mean a la Isgro (Emilio, the Italian artist) ?

No, I mean they would have to be evocative, Permanent’s soul has to remain intact, otherwise we would finish up with a selection of articles. You know, it’s a magazine made of images, a sort of illustrated magazine so if we’d have to select texts they would have to be visual texts, with a particular page layout or with an visually evocative content.

How do you choose the direction from one issue to another?

I think we’re a bit naif, when we finish an issue we’re so charged and full of adrenalin that we’d love to put another one together, immediately. So we start tearing other images, almost randomly, with my sensibility for images with a strong visual impact and with Maurizio’s preference for more learned and ironic, sharp pictures. When we have enough images we decide or try to understand the direction where we want to go with the issue. If, in the meantime, something like the Twin Towers attack happens then we start another issue and leave the one we were working on in order to develop an issue based on the latest events.

Besides the 11th of September, how does Permanent relate to the tragedies that have become everyday reality, at least from the media’s point of view, the war and all the other news related to the American occupation of Iraq?

The Twin Towers attack has been a clamorous event, with a very strong and tragic visual impact. The war has sadly become everyday reality, so the perception we have of it doesen’t have the impact of the towers falling to the ground.

A few years ago there was a moment were sex became particulary evident, it played a big role within the pages of many big fashion magazines and that’s when we decided to edit an issue of Permanent with lots of sexual imagery. Sometimes I consider similar issues too monothematic. It’s the reflection of a perception you can literally feel in the air.

I’ve been thinking about making an issue about happiness and joy, a radiant and bright issue… but Maurizio and I have two different ways of working and as far as I’m concerned he’s the project leader. And his way of selecting images is different than mine so we would finish up with two different points of view of the same topic.

Permanent tries to be understated and sharp. We don’t want to simply make a portrait of the world we live in because that’s more than evident already with the media.

Where is Permanent Food going?

Where the editorial reality is going. Or simply where reality is going. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’d like to thank Paola Manfrin for this interview. Please check out Permanent Food in your local art bookstore.