A taste of Indiecon

As I write this I’m sitting at a table of magazines in a disused railway shed in Hamburg’s Oberhafen. The city is sweltering in late summer heat and the sun is streaming in through the glass roof, but the sheen of sweat on foreheads isn’t doing anything to dampen people’s spirits, because they’re here for this year’s Indiecon. I’m normally bad at getting around and enjoying the show, which is stupid. So this year I decided to do things differently, and I’m making this post as an excuse for getting away from my table and actually speaking to some of the publishers.

The following is a small selection of the magazines on show this year. It would be literally impossible to include everyone, but I’ll keep adding to the list over the weekend. Some of the magazines are long-time Stack favourites and others are titles that I’ve stumbled across for the first time this weekend, and I hope that taken together it gives some sense of the quality and variety of publishing on show at Indiecon.

Alex Haeyeon Kil and Veronica Jinseon Yu from Monochromator

Published in Seoul, Monochromator’s unique perspective comes from smushing two movies together and seeing what comes out. Their first issue combines Barbie and Oppenheimer, inspired by the Barbenheimer phenomenon that swept cinemas last summer, and producing a beautiful magazine that considers everything from the cultural hegemony of the USA in the 20th century, to the spatial identities of the two movies.
monochromatormagazine.com

Julia Deutsch from Koralle

It’s published mainly in German so I couldn’t read Koralle, but I love the design of this newcomer from Vienna. A feminist literary title, it’s one of the magazines I’d never seen before, and I particularly enjoyed the photo shoot with singer Christl vacuum packed in a sealed bag. (Picture three, above.) Creative director Julia Deutsch explained: “She was talking about when she was a child and she first realised society expected her to have a single gender. She felt suffocated, and so we did the obvious thing…”
korallemag.at

Nicolas Kemper and Ghazal Nematgorgani, New York Review of Architecture

Launched in 2019 in a basement in Chinatown, New York Review of Architecture (NYRA) has been through several iterations, shifting from a single sheet, to a riso printed pamphlet, to the newspaper format it uses today. Publisher Nicolas Kemper gave a fantastic presentation on the Friday night sharing the story of the magazine so far, including the adoption of their mascot Nyrat, and their exploits in the New York Magazine Softball League. (Apparently they’ve only been beaten by the New Yorker.)
nyra.nyc

Maria Azovtseva and Aleksandr Kirilenko from Bl8d

A magazine of dreams and unreality, the second issue of Bl8d focuses on questions of identity and belonging. The Estonian magazine was made in response to the aggression and repression of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the dreamlike narratives grapple with complicated ideas about national identity.
bl8dbook.com

Jeremy and Viêt Raider-Hoàng from No One

Mixing queer culture and nightlife, each issue of No One travels to a different city to report on the scenes it finds there. The first issue focuses on Amsterdam, both celebrating the joy of partying in the city, while also criticising the various forces that threaten to limit it.
noonemag.com

Auste Skrupskyte and Nino from Playground

Mixing playfulness with creativity, Playground’s second issue is themed around nostalgia, memory and childhood. It’s a subtle progression from the previous issue, adding more fun into the mix with nice touches like a ‘This or That’ game at the end of each issue, asking interviewees to name their preference on big questions like, ‘Shapes or colours?’, ‘Sound or tactility?’, and ‘Mornings or evenings?’.
studioplayground.myshopify.com

Daniel Kent from Broadcast

The magazine made by New York’s fultifaceted arts organisation Pioneer Works, Broadcast exists both online and in print. This first issue came out towards the end of last year, and according to Daniel the next issue is taking a big step up, tripling its pagination and boosting its ambitions.
pioneerworks.org/broadcast

Sami Emory and Tessa Love from Nobody

We delivered Nobody on Stack in July and I ran our Magazine Club with Sami and Tessa via Zoom last week, but this is the first time I’ve met them in person. A magazine telling, “stories about everything else”, it prioritises high quality journalism and provides a home for stories that might not be covered in more mainstream publications.
nobodyzine.com

Christian Nolle from Direction of Travel

Inspired by his love of flying, Christian Nolle makes Direction of Travel as a love letter to all things aviation. He has a huge collection of vintage airline ephemera, which he uses throughout the magazine, but he also looks at the subect more broadly, touching on issues like migration and international aid via the lens of flying.
directionoftravel.com

Baris Bilenser from Year Zero, publisher of Nuts, Offal and more

Based in Istanbul, Baris published three issues of his magazine Year Zero, and we delivered the final instalment to Stack subscribers in February 2021. He put the print magazine on hold and instead focused on running Year Zero as a digital radio station, but print is now back in his life, and instead of making his own magazine, Baris is working to help his friends produce their own strange and wonderful projects. So far that has included two issues of Richard Turley’s lookbook-inspired fashion magazine Nuts (click to scroll through some pictures of issue two above) and the brilliant Offal, made by Turley along with designer Julia Schäfer and editors Mark Blacklock and Roderick Stanley. We delivered that one to Stack subscribers in March this year and it’s totally awesome.
instagram.com/year___zero

Ellie Jackson, founder, editor-in-chief, and creative director of The Movement Movement

Reconsidering the role and definition of women’s sport, The Movement Movement takes a holistic view to consider all types of sports and activities, showing women who are setting their own standards via moving their bodies. That could mean cover star Shannon Ryan, who is blazing a trail through the professional boxing world, or it could mean a story on Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), which uses minute movements of the eye to counteract the trauma caused by past events.
themovementmovement.uk

Arjun Chadha, creative director and editor-in-chief of Get Familiar

Indiecon is entirely intertwined with my experience of Get Familiar. I met founder Arjun Chadha at Indiecon when he had just published the first issue of his zine about hip-hop culture. Over the years we’ve kept on meeting in Hamburg at the start of September, and it has been fantastic to see his project grow and evolve along the way. This sixth issue is the most accomplished yet, and I’m sure there are even better things to come.
getfamiliarmag.com

Emma Schneck, one of the editors at Anthroposphere

An environmental magazine that was started by students studying at Oxford University, Anthroposphere now operates independently of the university, but still draws upon the big brains of graduates and undergraduates to fill its pages.