Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages

The first ever UK festival Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages, highlighting endangered global and local languages through a creative festival. The Barbican, London will be filled with an explosion of voices and works with some of the world’s most endangered languages and dialects, new commissions and work by new voices from around the world. With some languages close to desolation, Voiced will be a joyous, celebration showing how they are being saved.

Through poetry, music, visual art, performance, talks and live events including workshops and free spaces, the festival brings together living and ancient languages, dialects and scripts with a remarkable line-up of global artists; brilliantly highlighting the vast creative impact art has on language and language has on art.

Voiced promises to introduce audiences to new ways of thinking about and engaging with language, with a set of five new poetry commissions about what ‘home’ means at its heart. London-based Filipino poet Troy Cabida, the National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa, Canadian Inuktitut writer Norma Dunning, Belarusian poet Hanna Komar and Amajagh poet and painter Hawad, who writes in the Tamajaght language, have each created new works in their personal endangered and minority languages, showing how both landscape and language diversity is under tremendous pressure to survive. 

Free Highlights 1 - 31 October include:

The Creative Voice Hub - Featuring the new poems and stories alongside audio and visual designs showing how the decline of biodiversity is intimately linked with language. 

The Audio Trail - perfect for all, including families, to follow hidden languages using a map which takes listeners through the hidden quiet spaces of the Barbican, London to discover a sonic experience and audio treasure trove of ‘in the field’ recordings from sound artist Jamie Perera, using never before heard recordings.

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) - discover a unique digital repository preserving multimedia collections of endangered languages from all over the world spoken and sung making them available for future generations, with some languages already lost in the living world. Curated by director of the Endangered Languages Archive Mandana Seyfeddinipur.

There will be a series of WORKSHOPS which will be full of creativity and finding exciting ways of visualising and hearing endangered languages on Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 October.  

There will be Live Performance and Panel Discussion from Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 October, with top artists performing and discussing languages close to desolation with a joyous, celebration of how they are being saved.

Tickets on sale Monday 11 August & on general sale Friday 15 August 

See website for details

Venue details