What Shibboleth means
Historically, a shibboleth is a linguistic password, a word used to distinguish one group from another based on how they pronounce it, functioning as a test of belonging or exclusion. We chose this name because our project investigates how language creates fractures between people, working to implement initiatives that counter this phenomenon. For this reason, the tomato became our logo: a nod to the American-British pronunciation split “tomayto-tomahto.”
Projects with the People
Shibboleth develops long‑term research projects with communities that experience broken or limited access to language and expression, most frequently children on the autism spectrum, second‑generation citizens, migrants, and people in prison. Our work investigates how linguistic barriers become obstacles to knowledge, autonomy, and participation, and how publishing can intervene in these fractures.
We design educational programmes in collaboration with institutions, hospitals, schools, and scientific teams. These partnerships bring together forms of expertise that hold art and science in the same frame, allowing us to operate within the field of social prescribing and to build alliances that are long‑term, structured, and rooted in the everyday realities of the communities involved.
Our role is to activate social processes: to create situations where people can rehearse agency, negotiate difference, and access tools that help them articulate their own knowledge. The mechanics, structure, and practical use of each book emerge directly from these encounters, turning every project into a tool shaped by, and returned to, the people who make it possible.
Projects for the Page
Shibboleth operates as a publishing house, producing and distributing books, participating in fairs, and maintaining a public catalogue. Yet our publications are first and foremost learning tools. They emerge from long‑term research with communities and are designed for practical use: to teach, to support expression, or to offer alternative ways of working with language beyond idioms.
Through art assignments and multi‑disciplinary engagements, we develop a catalogue of printed proposals for a language composed of images rather than words. This approach highlights the width of the world in contrast to the narrowness of linguistic labels, and emphasises the potential of lens‑based practices for the resolution of conflict. Our publications include visual monographs of concepts, image‑based encyclopaedias, pictionaries, visual translations of novels, proverb glue‑in albums, and photographic short stories. Each book questions the order of priority between words and the world, using photography as an entry point.
As a publisher, Shibboleth releases only one or two new titles per year. Each publication is the result of a year‑long research process in which content develops organically with the people involved in the social projects. Meaning, structure, and potential for collective use arise through continuous interaction and exchange. Particular care is given to the mirroring of content and form, while the decision to adopt only standard formats (A3, A4, A5, A6) stems from a commitment to accessibility for readers and sustainability in production.
This dual nature—artist’s book and educational tool—is intentional. It reflects our belief that art is structurally necessary to society: it generates new forms of attention, new pedagogies, and new possibilities for learning in the everyday. We value the book both as a democratic way to access knowledge and as a tool for making and taking art outside institutional frameworks.
