Throughout October, the Barbican in London is hosting Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages. It’s the first UK festival for artists who create in indigenous languages and dialects. And it explores themes of art, language, the idea of home and belonging – including how all four intersect.

Festival events include The Creative Voice, a free exhibition with newly commissioned poems in endangered languages and script-based visual artworks, exploring ideas of home and language.

The exhibition, co-curated by artists Sam Winston and Chris McCabe, is complemented by a live literature programme. This includes talks and a panel discussion with writers Irvine Welsh and Raymond Antrobus, performances of the commissioned poems, as well as Yiddish and dialect poetry and an open mic poetry night.

Sound artist Jamie Perera has also created a sound trail of endangered languages, located in hidden places across the Barbican estate. It invites people to “lend their ears, reflect and connect with cultures and languages at risk of being forgotten”. This culminates in Babel Reclaimed, described as “an ocean of endangered languages moving around the world”.

The Creative Voice exhibition is located at the back of the performing arts centre, just before the entrance to Barbican Kitchen restaurant. Deceptively small in terms of physical space, the exhibition is ambitious in its scope, incorporating an eclectic range of exhibits which clamour for attention.

The five commissioned poems, called the Global Poems for Home, are drawn from across Africa, North America, Asia and Europe. Together they form a central focus, connecting with home and belonging through letter forms, script and colour ideas, and experiences of language.

In dialogue with the poems, Winston has created the artworks Seed Syllable Flags, displayed high above the poems and exhibition space, which each show one word. These words, chosen by the five poets, are inscribed in endangered or minority script and in a unique colour connected to that poem. The colours are made using inks derived from materials connected to place or experience. According to text panels in the exhibition, the term Seed Syllable refers to a short, sacred sound or mantra.

The flags are positioned above the audio readings of the poems and the written displays, with descriptions of each of the flags alongside the poems to which they connect, creating an immersive space, with exhibit colours echoing the coloured dyes of the flags. The poems are displayed in several languages alongside a translation to (or from) English, with the translators involved named.

Tuareg poet Hawad’s poem Our Land Keens, originally written in Tamajaght language and in Tiginagh script (the Tuareg alphabet), references “blood ochre”, the colour of the associated flag. This is linked to the colour of the poet’s home landscape, where ochre is now inaccessible for the poet. The word itself is colourless on a red ochre flag.

A poem by Norma Dunning, I Will Be at Home, originally in English, is shown alongside its translation to Inuktitut, accompanied by the word “veins”, painted in ink made from wild blueberries. Dunning connects place with the body, stating:

Home is a place of calm

Where the river widens

Flowing into my veins.

Smoke by Filipino poet Troy Cabida is written on the flag in Tagalog and in Baybayin script, with ink made from Marlboro Red cigarettes. Smoke is evocative of an urban childhood and memories of buying cigarettes for their parents as a young child.

Iraqi-Welsh poet Hanan Issa’s What Colour Are You?, an English-language poem with Arabic words intermingled, plays with translation. The Iraqi Arabic greeting “how are you?” translates literally as “what colour are you?” The words “how are you?” are translated into Arabic for the associated flag, using Kohl ink, connecting with the charcoal used in makeup and traditional tattoos.

On the fifth flag, the word “continuity” is inscribed in Cyrillic script in ink made of chokeberries, a fruit connected to poet Hanna Komar’s memories of childhood in Belarus.

Beyond the poems, the exhibits explore the relationship between writing traditions and the existence of languages, showcasing photographs and anthropological films of speakers which showcase living languages and everyday communication from the Endangered Languages Archive, both beyond and very much besides language. Three bilingual dialect poems from the UK, an important reminder of the nation’s multilingual and multi-dialectal heritage, are also displayed.

While relatively small in scale, The Creative Voice exhibition offers deep insights into connections between language, place, materiality and our interconnected senses of belonging and home. Together, the exhibits create an immersive, interactive document of endangered languages and their relationship to memory and lived experience, as well as colour, shape and texture.

The Seed Syllable Flags offer an urgent alternative to nation-state colours and emblems, inviting reflection on what happens when languages (and homelands) are lost. What do we lose? What is at stake? And, importantly, who loses the most?

Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages is at Barbican London until October 31 2025, moving to Manchester in 2026