It was born from a simple idea: every journey carries more than luggage. It carries materials, gestures, landscapes, encounters, memories, and choices. A bag can begin as an object, but it soon becomes a witness.

It moves through airports, roads, villages, cities, workshops, markets, stations, homes. It touches the world and gathers traces of it. This magazine follows those traces.

The world of AFAR

AFAR creates travel bags and accessories in Ethiopia, working with local materials, skilled hands, and a strong social mission. Its collections are made for movement, but they remain connected to the places, people, and knowledge from which they come.

For AFAR, a bag is never only a product. It is a meeting point between design and work, between beauty and responsibility, between travel and origin.

This is why A Bag of Stories looks beyond the finished object. We follow cotton, leather, raffia, clay, thread, metal, and color. We enter workshops. We listen to makers. We look at supply chains, cooperatives, small companies, and local economies. We ask how things are made, who makes them, and what kind of future they help build.

We are interested in travel that pays attention.

The method of Ayzoh!

Ayzoh! is a documentary and editorial organization based in Italy, working with communities through photography, writing, books, exhibitions, workshops, and long-term visual projects.

Its work begins with a clear position: stories are created with people, not for them.

In A Bag of Stories, Ayzoh! brings its field-based method: listening before writing, observing before explaining, giving images time, protecting dignity, and refusing the easy frames that turn people into symbols. The magazine treats photography and writing as tools for relationship, memory, and public understanding.

We look for complexity. We avoid spectacle. We care about context. We believe that every person, craft, place, and community deserves to be represented with attention and respect.

What we publish

A Bag of Stories brings together reportage, photo essays, field notes, interviews, essays, and visual stories from the worlds of travel, craft, culture, design, and local futures.

We write about journeys, but also about what journeys reveal.

We publish stories about artisans and materials, cultural practices and performing arts, ethical companies and independent workshops, landscapes and cities, objects and rituals, communities and forms of knowledge that often remain outside the faster narratives of travel and fashion.

Some stories begin with a bag. Others begin with a road, a performance, a market, a village, a studio, a festival, a person, or a single photograph.

All of them ask the same question: what do we carry, and what carries us?

How we work

We believe in slow attention. Our stories are built through research, fieldwork, photography, editing, and conversation. Whenever possible, we work close to the people and places we describe. We value consent, privacy, accuracy, and the right of communities to be seen beyond stereotypes.

We do not treat culture as decoration. We do not use hardship as spectacle. We do not believe that good stories need to simplify the world in order to move the reader. We prefer stories that open a door.

A shared magazine

A Bag of Stories is shaped by AFAR’s commitment to meaningful objects and Ayzoh!’s commitment to responsible storytelling.

Together, they create a magazine for readers who care about where things come from, who makes them, how places are represented, and how travel can become more attentive, more human, and more connected.

This is a magazine for the long road. For the hands behind the object. For the communities behind the image. For the stories we carry, and the ones that carry us.