Magazine Middle Plane takes an experimental approach to a familiar format

Issue 0 of Middle Plane, a magazine challenging the familiarity of the form – founded and edited by Roni Monhait, and art directed by design studio VLF – features print quotes, repeat pages, and instructions on how to hand wash clothes on the cover. Its experimental approach is “preoccupied with process”, and, as the synopsis describes: “Here we present a preparation – a work-in-progress so that we might open a frank dialogue with the reader with a new level of transparency”.

While it’s not entirely clear what the magazine is about from Middle Plane’s first issue, that seems to be the intention. Running with its aforementioned transparent approach to publishing, the result challenges both preconceptions about a magazine’s possible form, and those the reader puts upon it.

Rather than editorial focused on selling clothes, Middle Plane features full-page artworks, photo stories that take advantage of the structure to portray a narrative and an abstracted representation of an email, laid out one word per page and footnoted, dismantling the nature of the back-and-forth communication involved in putting together a magazine.

In terms of theme, its first issue will "revolve around [Russian conceptual artist] Vadim Zakharov’s view of the intellectual, artistic, creative and fashion worlds and will be curated by [gallerists] fontaine b”, but by the sounds of it, Middle Plane will maintain its experimental approach, “in a radical composition of unpublished works… newly conceived texts… and specially developed projects viewed and designed from a fashion perspective”.