Regarder, penser, décider: A Migration Workshop Companion

The booklet was designed for César Dezfuli and Amadou Soumaila’s migration education project in Mali — part workshop companion, part take-home reference. The audience ranged from young people in Bamako to internally displaced participants to local photographers, so the design had to be readable without being reductive, and emotionally direct without moralizing.

The approach was restraint. Heavy white space, documentary photography, route maps, statistics, and first-person testimony carry the content. The structure moves from the broad to the specific: migration as a global reality, Mali’s position as a country of departure, transit, and arrival, then César’s long-term photographic project Passengers, then individual stories — violence, survival, waiting, return. Amadou Soumaila’s story becomes the connective thread.

The photographs and testimonies don’t need design to be affecting. They need design that doesn’t compete with them.