The idea struck Vanessa Ellingham in an IKEA in Berlin. She had just moved from New Zealand, was buying furniture for her second new apartment in a year — Copenhagen the first time, Berlin now — and found herself thinking about all the other people standing in IKEA stores around the world doing exactly the same thing. Buying a KALLAX shelf in a foreign city, trying to make a strange place feel like home. That was 2017, and the result was NANSEN, a print magazine named after Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who later became the League of Nations' first High Commissioner for Refugees.
The concept is radically simple: each issue tells the story of a single migrant. Not a survey of migration policy, not a roundup of refugee experiences, but one person's life examined in depth. Issue one followed Aydin Akin, a 78-year-old Turkish-German activist who cycles across Berlin every day demanding equal rights for newcomers. The magazine spent time at Berlin's notoriously stressful immigration office, charted the history of Turkish guest workers who arrived in the 1960s, and talked to döner shop workers and barbers in Aydin's neighborhood.
Ellingham, who is herself a migrant — a New Zealander who has lived in Copenhagen, Berlin, and beyond — understands something essential about the genre: the sweeping issue of migration becomes human only at the scale of a single life. A later issue featured Muzhgan Samarqandi, an Afghanistani broadcaster building a new life in Aotearoa New Zealand, whose family migration history reaches back eight centuries to the time of Genghis Khan. Her writing about being told to shut up and be grateful, about finding unexpected kinship with Māori people, turns policy abstractions into something you can feel in your chest.
NANSEN is published in limited-edition print runs with playful, engaging design. It is a quiet, necessary publication — proof that the most powerful way to talk about millions of displaced people is to sit down with one of them and really listen.
<a href="https://www.nansenmagazine.com/">Visit NANSEN