Book display and presentation of the Shibboleth project with Allegra Baggio Corradi and Elisa Mapelli

Shibboleth is a nonprofit arts organization with publishing at its core. Shibboleth is also the first chapter of Emic Units, a series about the migration of ideas explor­ing how far the confines of  meaning can be stretched geographically, historically, metaphorically and visually.

On Tuesday afternoon we’ll have the chance to talk with Allegra and Elisa about the various facets of this organization and enjoy the first publications they have produced.

The box contains fifty visual interpretations of the term shibboleth, a word to which no language can lay claim, a hard-to-falsify linguistic sign used to winnow identities in order to establish policies and borders. Each of the fifty booklets is by a different author and is conceived as an exercise book for the social projects we run among the different communities with whom we collaborate long-term.

Among the authors: Joachim Schmid, David Horvitz, Johan Grimonprez, Petra Stavast, Kensuke Koike, Anya Jasbar, Duncan Wooldridge, Osvald Landmark, Cornelius de Bill Baboul.

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As a publisher of visual books, Shibboleth is interested in dismantling the idea that an image is inevitably a document. Their projects for the page develop outside and inside communities characterised by an unconventional use of language owing to cognitive impairments, e.g., neuropsychiatry patients; or a limited access to education caused by socio-political hardships, e.g., second generation children. 

The catalogue comprises visual translations of out of copyright fiction, visual proverb calendars, visual dictionaries, encyclopaedias, postcards and photo tabloids and contains propositions for a progressive shift from a verbal to a visual language system, hijacking traditional genres and formats to camouflage their artistic research in non-artistic contexts. Linguistic ambiguity is purposefully preserved to emphasise the use they make of images as elastic: how far can an image be stretched until its meaning breaks? Can images replace words in a shared system of signs and symbols?