Independent Publishing Festival 2024

Sep 06 – 08, 2024

Oberhafen, Hamburg - Save the date!

Conference 2021

INDIECON CONFERENCE 2021  — REFLECTIONS

In case you missed it: You can find the recordings of both evenings online. The links lead to our Instagram account.

PUBLISHING FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

RAFAELA KAĆUNIĆ & NINA VUKELIĆ (This is Badland) KEMI FATOBA (Daddy Magazine) in conversation with ARIANA ZUSTRA

CRITICAL DESIGN FOR CRITICAL FUTURES

LIZ GOMIS (OFF TO Magazine) ANNA BROUJEAN (Club Sandwich Magazine) in conversation with LARS WEISBROD (ZEIT)


In a two-part conference in collaboration with ZEITVerlag and designxport, powered by Die Brueder Publishing, independent publishers and critical designers share their insights on how independent publishing practices can be tools for social change and hope. Due to Covid-19, you need a personalised ticket to enter the conference. Sign up for a ticket. The conference will take place at designxport (→ map).


Friday

Publishing for Social Change

3 SEP, 7PM – 9PM (doors 6PM)

Independent magazines redefine cultural narratives. THIS IS BADLAND is a biannual print publication and online platform dedicated to the exploration of art, design, and culture from the Balkans and beyond. DADDY Magazine is a Berlin-based publication that examines the tough issues (like racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination) through a humorous lens. Both DADDY Magazine & THIS IS BADLAND reflect on the motivations for starting their magazine, the challenges, the tools, and the learnings they encountered and apply.

Line-up

RAFAELA KAĆUNIĆ & NINA VUKELIĆ (This is Badland) & KEMI FATOBA (Daddy Magazine) in conversation with ARIANA ZUSTRA 

Untangling the seemingly contradictory, THIS IS BADLAND is an annually published magazine, taking its Balkan roots as a starting point to mine cross-cultural connections in a new light.

Veering away from any homogenous understanding of reality, the magazine celebrates the complexity of our fragmented sense of culture, giving voice to an emerging generation of creative talents. Imbued with intellectual curiosity and playful spirit, they explore the worlds where conflicting ideas, unexpected affinities, and hybrid concepts collide.

The name This is Badland comes with a dose of humor, irony and is a certain provocation, echoing the magazine’s ethos. It deconstructs, renegotiates, and reinvents social, cultural, and geographical phenomena connected and inspired by the area known as the Balkans, not in terms of territory but shared—though ambivalent—cultural imaginary.

RAFAELA KAĆUNIĆ

After ten years of drawing lines between the fashion and music industries on a wide range of freelance projects, Rafaela co-founded THIS IS BADLAND as a creative director to bring new and unusual Balkan rooted spin to the domain of self-published cultural magazines. Four issues after the experimental take off, THIS IS BADLAND was described by Zeit Magazine’s Chief-Editor Christoph Amend as “The most fascinating new independent magazine.” Currently, she’s a supporting member and ambassador of Vision for Children, and works as a Senior Global Art Director in the e-commerce sector.

NINA VUKELIĆ

In the course of shifting careers from curating contemporary art to editing and writing for digital media upon finding new home in Berlin, Nina dreamed up of bringing her vision of the Adriatic reimagined to life. Today, she stacks her editorial outlook between pages of THIS IS BADLAND to highlight narratives that reflect on growing up and living in a culturally hybrid environment.

DADDY Magazine launched in 2016 with a vision to diversify the German mediascape by creating an online magazine that focuses on the voices and stories of those who are not represented enough in traditional media. The DADDY-verse includes an annual print magazine. DADDY’s channels center the perspectives of marginalized people by letting them tell their stories, their way, and amplify their voices. An intersectional magazine, Black-owned and led by Kemi Fatoba.

KEMI FATOBA

is the co-founder of DADDY Magazine. She lives in Berlin, where she writes about identity, culture, and representation. She is a journalist and content strategist from Vienna.

She moved to London after graduating from the University of Vienna (Media Studies) and now lives in Berlin, where she writes about identity, culture, and representation. She is a contributing editor at vogue.de where she also has a column titled “Schwarz mit großem S” (Black with a capital B). 

Moderator

ARIANA ZUSTRA

born in Dubrovnik in 1987, lives as a freelance journalist and musician in Berlin. After studying cultural studies and sociology, she completed a traineeship at Rolling Stone and trained at Die Reportageschule and at Axel Springer Akademie.

As an author, she writes for Musikexpress and Spiegel Online, among others, and as a reader she works for the sustainability magazine Perspective Daily. As a host and speaker, she was active for re:publica. She is also a critic in the radioeins program "Soundcheck – Das musikalische Quartett". With her essay on blackfishing in "kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop" she won the Reeperbahn Festival's International Music Journalism Award 2020. Since 2019 she has been working as a freelance editor for the classical music institution PODIUM Esslingen, for example for their project #bebeethoven. As ZUSTRA, she releases her own music, which has been played on BBC Radio 6, among others. The city magazine tip Berlin voted her in the list of the most important newcomers in 2021. Her debut album "The Dream Of Reason" will be released in early 2022.


Saturday

Critical Design For Critical Futures

4 SEP, 7PM – 9PM (doors 6PM)

Design manifests in independent publishing through content, layout, and typography, embodying culture on its pages. From cuisine, art, politics to urban infrastructure, our futures and society take shape. Paris-based Club Sandwich magazine, at first sight, dedicates an issue to a specialty food such as chocolate, cucumbers, or most recently, watermelon, diving into journalism and art. OFF TO magazine’s notion of critical design centers urbanism and culture and goes beyond postcard clichés of capital cities on the African continent. OFF TO & Club Sandwich magazine lead us through their design and publishing practices.

Line-up

LIZ GOMIS (OFF TO Magazine) ANNA BROUJEAN (Club Sandwich Magazine) in conversation with LARS WEISBROD (Die Zeit)

Club Sandwich is an independent and nonprofit annual magazine published in Paris, with bilingual content (French/English). Each issue focuses on a particular food and its cultural and societal representation in various and eclectic fashions. The magazine is not an encyclopedia but rather an anthology of informative content infused with humor. Club Sandwich shows the multifaceted aspects of its subject and envisions print as a media that needs time to be discovered.

ANNA BROUJEAN

was born in Paris and graduated from the French National School of Photography in 2015. Multifarious artist, her work is stamped with humor and mixes several mediums such as photography, sound, video, installation, and sculpture. Kitsch lover, compulsive images collector, personal and institutional archives give rise to an inexhaustive stories material. Winner of the Roederer Prize, she’s been welcome in residencies in France, Canada, China, Athens, and Monaco. While in residency in Montreal in 2015, she has founded the paper magazine Club Sandwich, which she edits and art directs herself. She currently has her studio at Poush, an artist space in Paris, where she works on a sculpture-furniture line and on different writing and photography projects.

OFF TO magazine is a bi-annual, bilingual (FR & ENG) publication dedicated to capital cities of the African continent, made with passion by a team of young and brilliant African creatives and powered by African (+Diaspora) women only. OFF TO offers a unique perspective on African cities. Dedicated to the discovery of a major African city, through the eyes of those who are shaping and living it, OFF is a starting point for a conversation about our futures. OFF TO addresses the challenges ahead of us whether they are economic, cultural, social, urban or environmental. OFF TO is also a travel magazine, a guide that calls upon the visitor’s common sense to understand Africa’s urban spaces  and the cultural subtleties that define them.

LIZ GOMIS

Unraveling unheard stories with her lens and her pen since 2003, Liz Gomis has always been running around the world. From France, where she was born, to Senegal or from Brazil to Uganda working for all types of media as a journalist.


Starting in Radio Nova, she ended up in Canal Plus TV to finally find her way as a freelancer, she directed short documentaries in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal & Ghana such as “Africa Riding” & “Let’s Dance” (ARTE) and more recently “Africa Demain” to be released in September (France TV Slash). She gave video workshops in Burkina Faso and Rwanda (Unicef), taught radio basics for kids in the suburbs of Paris (Banlieues Bleues Fest). She managed film sets as an executive producer for US event companies (Afropunk, Live Nation).


As a diaspora kid, Liz always had to find answers by herself to connect the dots between her African heritage to her western life. She became a journalist to find those answers and play her part to flip the script in western media and contribute to a global change in mindset that looks at the African continent with less of a distorted gaze.


Today she’s gathering a team of African nomadic, creative women fully committed to offer new narratives. They are eager to embrace this with OFF TO, a magazine dedicated to African urban cities. The publication, born during the first lockdown and fabricated between the African continent and Europe is a crossroads of all her activities.

Moderator

LARS WEISBROD

Born in 1985 in Bremen, Lars Weisbrod is a feature-editor at the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. He studied at the Henri-Nannen-Journalism School.

Organizers and concept

NINA PRADER

is an artist, writer, curator between Vienna and Berlin. 

Born in Washington D.C., USA (1990), she studied at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston (TUFTS University) and at the Slade in London (UCL). She received her MA in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.

Her work focuses on Printed Matters and independent publishing practices in relation to social justice questions, centering community, education, and art. Publications include Spex, Texte zur Kunst, Arts of the Working Class. She designed the memory tool and artist book MemoryGames, a dialogical card-game, to trigger conversation about the Shoah & Diaspora-stories of migration. She seeks to question, activate, and re-envision cultural narratives. 


designxport is the interdisciplinary center for design-related topics in Hamburg. As a network, incubator, and idea space, we support the design industry in growth, development, and transformation. We understand design as an attitude, discipline, and method for shaping socio-political challenges. designxport is part of Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft.