Open-borders is an independent visual and literary project about freedom, identity, memory and imagination.
The adventure began during the COVID years, at a time when borders were closing and many people felt isolated. The first idea was simple: to bring together friends, writers and photographers from different places, and to create something despite the distance — texts inspired by images, images answering texts, fragments of life crossing borders.
Since then, Open-borders has grown into a small creative laboratory. We have published several printed magazines, experimented with collective writing, and created a novel written together, one chapter at a time. The project continues to evolve through photography, short stories, essays, visual narratives, music poems and new creative tools, including AI.
Open-borders is not a commercial magazine in the traditional sense. It is a space for encounters: between people, languages, memories, countries, generations and forms of expression. Some texts are intimate, others political or absurd. Some images document reality; others transform it. What links them is the desire to look beyond fixed categories and to keep imagination open.
The project is edited by Pierre Matile, who also created the Open-borders magazine and wrote Dictatorship of Experts.
Today, Open-borders brings together three main directions:
Read — visual stories, portraits, essays and printed magazines.
Listen — music poems and spoken fragments.
Look — street photography and visual memories from places crossed over the years.
Open-borders is an invitation to explore what happens when images, words and sounds meet — across borders, real or imaginary.
