Homographs. A Pictionary

Publishing: Shibboleth / Concept and Research: Allegra Baggio Corradi / Printing: Nava Press, Milan. 2025, English, hardcover, edition of 500, A6, 448 pages, rotary printing, Dutch binding, blue headband, red and blue cotton ribbon bookmarks, marbled endpapers. Cover: Manifattura del Seveso Setalux 1738 with black debossing on cover and back. Paper: Holmen Book Cream 80gr. ISBN 978-88-947591-5-0.

The first edition of Homographs is currently sold out. The second edition is due end of November 2026.

Homographs was made possible with support from un/fund, a funding platform by un/produced, Paris. Special thanks to Rosie Donoghue and Hana Olver for their encouragement.

Project for the Page

Homographs. A Pictionary is a visual dictionary for learning English through images rather than words. Built from 200 diptychs, each centred on a single English word with at least two meanings—cell as the smallest unit of the body and confinement, bark as sound and surface, wave as greeting and rising sea—the book proposes photography as a means of conflict resolution in contexts where language and communication are broken or limited. The images are partly newly photographed and partly drawn from public‑domain archives: some pixelated, some pristine; some archival, some amateur. This heterogeneity mirrors the mixed registers of the vocabulary itself—technical terms (adder), everyday words (bank), slang (joint), and politically loaded words (Indian).

Formally, the book presents itself as a classic dictionary, echoing the German Langenscheidt the author used as a child in school. This choice recalls the borderland of South Tyrol where she was born, a region historically marked by the linguistic rift between Italian‑ and German‑speaking communities. There, language has long operated as a boundary, an instrument of institutionalised discrimination disguised as order. The book’s stern exterior contrasts with an interior rich in contradictions and semantic tensions, staging the instability of meaning and the labour of navigating life between cultures. Through this tension, Homographs positions the photobook as a tool for social prescribing and participation, using images to expand access and expression beyond linguistic borders.

Homographs in English is the first volume of a larger series of visual dictionaries currently under development. Each edition corresponds to a linguistic family, forming a colour‑coded shelf in which every family appears as a single hue composed of multiple shades. The series is conceived as a peace‑making project: a way of showing that linguistic difference is not a boundary but a spectrum, and that together these books form a single rainbow. Each volume is entrusted to a different author who is a native speaker of the language explored in that edition. The content grows out of workshops with communities selected according to the specific linguistic angle the book wishes to address. The French volume, for instance, examines the creolisation of contemporary French, while the Italian edition focuses on linguistic minorities.

Projects for the People

Developed in London between 2013 and 2019 during workshops with migrants, Homographs treats photography as a supralinguistic tool, a shared ground for communication that shows things for what they are rather than for what they are called. The 200 alphabetically-ordered words contained in it were chosen directly from the terms participants used the most, either to express their practical needs during their first months in a new country, or to reminisce about life elsewhere. At the end of the volume, each term is accompanied both by its conventional dictionary definition and by the meaning proposed by workshop participants, derived from how they actually use the word.

The book reproduces the sense of loss felt by those trying to orient themselves in a place where they do not yet speak the language or understand the cultural codes required to access meaning and, with it, one’s civic role as a citizen and individual. This applied to migrants during the project’s research phase however the book is also often used during classes with neurodivergent children to stimulate language development. Reading becomes a memory game that refuses the match: nothing aligns neatly, and understanding emerges from difference rather than sameness. Photography becomes a non‑idiomatic language, capable of bypassing the exclusions embedded in words across different contexts marked by fragility.