Homographs. A Pictionary by Allegra Baggio Corradi

Developed through long-term workshops with migrant communities in London, 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 work proposes photography as a means of conflict resolution in contexts where language and communication are broken or limited. Conceived in the visual and pedagogical spirit of the German Langenscheidt dictionaries the author used as a child, it adopts the authority of a classic language reference dictionary while subverting it from within.

Published by Shibboleth in 2025, it is the first volume of a broader series of colour-coded visual dictionaries dedicated to different linguistic families, each entrusted to a native-speaking author and shaped through workshops with communities relevant to the linguistic angle of the volume. Together, these books can be considered a peace-making project conveying a spectrum of languages that, like a rainbow, reveals difference as continuity rather than division.

About the Artist

Allegra Baggio Corradi is a publisher and researcher based in Milan. She holds an MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture and a PhD in early modern history of ideas from the Warburg Institute. She coordinates CIRCI, the International Research Centre for the Culture of Childhood, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, and in 2023 founded Shibboleth, a publishing collective focused on language. She also writes essays, reviews, and criticism on art and cultural history.