ModMay NY Edition Speakers: Migrant Journal

MIGRANT JOURNAL explores the circulation of people, goods and information around the world and looks at the transformative impact they have on contemporary life.

Before I get into the magazine, here’s the important reason why it’s our magazine of the week… if not the month… if not the year:

If 2014 was a year of food magazines, 2015 a year of pet magazines, 2016 was a year of new feminist titles. The trend away from light-hearted themes towards more vigorous and politically motivated topics that KRASS, GIRLS LIKE US and

LADYBEARD have been exploring is encouraging weightier magazines to launch Kickstarter campaigns, of which MIGRANT JOURNAL and THE REAL REVIEW are two of the newest examples.

MIGRANT JOURNAL gestures towards the fact that print can circulate ideas across and outside of our self-imposed, online borders. It can circulate opinion, information and all-important fact in spaces far out of reach from dangerous cooperate interests.

The team plan a limited six-issue run and each edition will take a different theme related to migration as its starting point. Issue one looks at the spaces beyond the city through essays and reports; it explores what’s happening in the countryside, from the rural exodus in Japan to the shifting glaciers in the alps to undocumented spaces that migrants move through in Mexico.

Its not just people, or even goods, that are in circulation. It’s energy, the Internet, the cables that flow. By emphasising this, MIGRANT JOURNAL asks a political question: if we build a wall to prevent migration, are we to cut cords too?

The theme of ‘Across Country’ is timely; the editors consider the current refugee crisis in Europe and how it’s brought the countryside to attention. Syrians fleeing the war via Turkey and Greece move across the fields and landscapes of Europe, and as the editors note, ‘the forgotten rural land is the stage of our present migration tragedy, not the cities.’

The strength of the words is conveyed through mature design, which is in contrast to a title like WEAPONS OF REASONS where the force of the editorial can be undermined by its sometime coy visual elements. The politically motivated magazines of next year will use editorial design for asserting power and clarity.

MIGRANT JOURNAL is vigorously intelligent in the way it circulates ideas about the circulation of people and information today. – MADELEINE MORLEY, MAGCULTURE JOURNAL, 11.16.16

LAUNCHED 2016 LONDON & ZURICH BIANNUAL ISSUE FOUR ABOUT TO LAUNCH MIGRANTJOURNAL.COM