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Shibboleth presents two publications that show how books can function as social technologies for thinking and learning together. Thesaurus of Child Ecology, made with a primary school class in Italy, reveals how children imagine their own schoolbooks - tactile, colorful, re‑orderable, transformable into installations - and highlights what happens when adults design educational materials without considering the people who will use them. Homographs, developed through workshops with migrants in the UK, uses photography to navigate words with multiple meanings, returning the image to its simplest function: pointing to the thing it represents. Together, the books reflect Shibboleth’s approach to publishing as a social practice: designing with communities, listening closely to their ways of seeing and speaking, and creating books that remain open to use, activation, and shared interpretation. The evening invites artists, educators, designers, and readers to consider how publishing can become a form of public practice. |
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Thesaurus of Child Ecology shows what happens when children contribute to designing their own school books.The volume is a reader of ecology as a school subject and a practical tool showing how the ecology of images works as a method for learning collectively. At the heart of the book are 250 cards, divided into three colour-coded categories: Names, Things, and Uses. Names offer concise definitions of key concepts in ecology. Things contain synopses of texts written between 300 BCE and 2020 that relate to those concepts. Uses present exercises designed to activate and connect names and things through practical engagement. Together, these cards function like the components of a living thesaurus—where meaning is discovered through use, relation, and context. |
 Homographs (English) Homographs (English) is the first volume of Uses and Names (UN), a visual dictionaries series. Words are selected that have at least two different referents in the world and are laid out on a spread to emphasise the narrowness of language with respect to the width of the world. So, a cataract is at once an eye disease and a waterfall. A bat is an animal and the tool used in baseball. Basket is a woven item and a sport. Bark is the verse of dogs and the outermost layer of tree trunks. |
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Shibboleth is an independent publishing cooperative based in Milano, Italy. It develops books as tools for thinking together. Working across photography, language, and collaborative pedagogy, it builds publications that emerge from real encounters, e.g., children designing their own learning materials, migrants negotiating new vocabularies. Its approach is grounded in listening and co‑making: each book is produced with its participants and remains open to further use, activation, and reinterpretation. Through this method, Shibboleth treats publishing as a social practice, creating objects that circulate knowledge while also generating the conditions for that knowledge to form.
www.shibboleth.page
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Edited by Sixuan Tong