In 2015, as bodies washed up on Mediterranean beaches and the European media reduced migration to a crisis narrative of numbers and borders, four people who were themselves migrants decided to do something about it. Catarina de Almeida Brito, a Portuguese architect living in Norway, and Justinien Tribillon, a French urbanist and PhD candidate at University College London, had met at the London School of Economics. They teamed up with Isabel Seiffert and Christoph Miler, a German-Austrian design duo running Offshore Studio in Zurich. None of them lived in the country they held a passport for. That simple biographical fact became the foundation of everything that followed.
They launched a Kickstarter in 2016 with a statement that was both manifesto and confession: "As practitioners and intellectuals but also as migrants ourselves, we have decided to take on this very complex and often dramatic topic of migration, convinced that the raging debate on this issue lacks depth and imagination, creativity and critical knowledge." The first issue, Across Country, arrived in a forest-green cover with copper metallic accents, a custom typeface by Offshore Studio whose combination of sharp corners and curving forms articulated the idea of transformation, and an atlas-like design that gave the publication a sense of authority that few independent magazines achieve. magCulture named it magazine of the week, if not the month, if not the year.
Migrant Journal was conceived from the start as a finite project: six biannual issues, each exploring a different aspect of migration, from the movement of people across borders to the circulation of goods, information, fauna, and flora. The scope was deliberately broad — migration as a universal process, not merely a political emergency. Contributors submitted proposals from around the world: writing, photographs, poems, comic strips, academic essays, art installations. Issue four was launched at MoMA PS1. The Design Museum in London hosted a Migrant Journal event on music and migration. Tate Modern invited the team to speak.
The sixth and final issue, Foreign Agents, appeared in 2019. There was no concluding essay, no summary, no resolution — by design. "We knew Migrant had to be a printed publication and not some online journal," Isabel explained, "because we felt it needed to be a document of this time." Tribillon, who continues to write for The Guardian and research the Paris-banlieue divide, put it more simply: "We hope that people will keep discovering this publication over the years — that it will be a capsule of how we, and this community of contributors, approached the topic of migration." In a media landscape where migration is almost always discussed in terms of fear, Migrant Journal insisted on something rarer: depth, imagination, and the conviction that the people who understand migration best are the ones who live it.
Explore Migrant Journal at <a href="https://migrantjournal.com/" target="\_blank">migrantjournal.com