Recently, my writing was translated into Arabic.
Presentiment for Halbmondlager, was commissioned by B7L9 Art Centre (@b7l9_tunis ) for Mohamed Ali Ltaief’s (@m__ltaief ) exhibition l Hear the Old Sound of the World’s Future.
The text builds on my ongoing research into the Somali internee, art sitter, Völkerschau participant, and language assistant Mohamed Nur, as well as a conversation between Mohamed Ali and myself, after I mixed a sound recording of Nur with that of Halbmondlager prisoner of war Sadok Ben Rachid Haj Youssef. It is a lament on Muslim presences in Germany.
SITAAD Studio: Acts of Opening
We are pleased to announce a new phase of SITAAD’s work in 2026.
We are collaborating with the AHRC-funded project Reassessing (Hi)stories of Early Italian Colonialism: Afterlives of Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti’s Photographic Archive, led by the University of Oxford in cooperation with the University of Pavia, to engage and digitise the Robecchi Bricchetti Photographic Archive.
The digitisation is led by SITAAD co-director Leyla Degan, photographic archivist currently at the photography archive of the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape in Milan.
Alongside the digitisation, a SITAAD-hosted workshop asks: what does it mean to move through a colonial photographic archive? And how can Somali-derived practices of protection guide alternative encounters with photography?
The collaboration also supports a new public SITAAD work, to be presented in Italy, alongside the launch of Studio Sawiro: a publication bringing together Somali writers across three continents to trace variegated histories of photography through multiple departures, including Somalia’s historical encounter with photography. Co-published with Soomaal House of Art (Minneapolis), and supported by the University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.
We extend our gratitude to the @italiancolonialafterlives team, to the University of Oxford Humanities Division’s Research Support Fund, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.
SITAAD STUDIO
Leyla Degan (@leyladegan ) and Naima Hassan (@naimasfieldnotes )
Read the announcement: sitaad.info/news
Four years after establishing SITAAD and developing our shared practice offline, we are extending our work to Instagram.
Rooted in sitaad, a devotional gathering organised by Somali women, we are space for archival and curatorial research, publishing, and collective knowledge production.
Over the years, we have reflected deeply on algorithmic visibility and on the limitations of presenting a continuous stream of archival material.
With this in mind, this Instagram page will act primarily as an interface for our offline projects and as an invitation to inhabit archives in their felt and material registers.
Leyla Degan, pictured, is a photography archivist and artist living and working in Milan, Italy.
Naima Hassan, pictured, is an archivist, curator and editor, living and working in Berlin, Germany.
1. Leyla Degan, 2026. Photography by Jim C. Nedd
2. Naima Hassan, 2024. Photography by Alexander Steffans
To mark a pivotal transition as we settle into the year, C& Magazine’s editorial team reflects on ideas of continuities and discontinuities within our approach.
Citing inspiration from methodologies such as counterpointed repetition, a poetic technique by Marlene Nourbese Philip used to deconstruct, disrupt, and re-narrate an archive, newly appointed C& Managing Editor Naima Hassan, alongside C& Editor-in-Chief Ethel-Ruth Tawe, engage with key episodes from the magazine’s 13-year history. 'Notes on Editorial Dis/Continuities' reflects on questions of stewardship and gestures through which those who came before are honoured.
A limited number of print copies are available for pick-up at the C& Berlin and Nairobi offices. Please enquire by emailing [email protected] with the subject line: pamphlet.
Read the digital version of the pamphlet via Link in Bio
Notes on Editorial Dis/Continuities, 2026.
1-color Risography printed by @wemakeitberlin Limited edition of 50. 14 × 19.5 cm.
Dhikr will echo from all corners, for Mohamed Nur 📿
Last Friday, I had the honour of presenting Notes on a Distributed Person as part of the public programme, Useful Archives at the Open Resource Center (ORC).
Reading Maori concepts of relational and non-biological personhood, Notes on a Distributed Person presents the material traces of Mohamed Nur, a Somali Völkerschau member and language assistant whose presence is dispersed across 20th-century German colonial archives. The refrain, an example sentence written by Nur, “Im nächsten Winter will ich reisen (zur See)” connects Nur’s internment and vocal recordings in Ruhleben (1917), his appearance in German impressionist art, and linguistic contributions at the University of Hamburg, and his sudden disappearance in 1921-22.
The presentation culminated in an act of Xirsi, a Somali protection practice, we are thinking through as SITAAD. It also invited reflections on other African prisoners of war recorded by the Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission (1915-1918), including Tunisian farm worker and popular poet Sadak Berresid’s whose arabic laments were recorded at Halfmoon Camp, the site of the first Islamic place of worship built on German soil.
A heartfelt thank you to @hfg_orc curators, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun and Zulfikar Filandra for this invtation.
Documentation, and further reflections will be shared on Leyla and I’s website ().
As the year draws to a close, I wanted to reflect on the Re:assemblages Symposium, held on 4–5 November and convened by G.A.S. Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.
Across two days, more than fifty practitioners came together around a set of shared questions: how might we gather for and with African art archives? How might we come to know them as spaces through which futures are shaped?
“By the end of the symposium, something had shifted in all of us. Across its two days, Re:assemblages offered a series of thresholds—ecological, archival, historical, and embodied. It asked us to consider how we might gather differently: across disciplines, across geographies, across the fragile seams of memory that connect us. Differently as in other ways of seeing, remembering, and keeping. Seeing might mean turning our attention to gestures, footnotes, margins, and ecologies to the trembling bodies of archives that resist containment. Keeping might reorient us toward care, kinship, and shared custodianship, toward archives that live through rather than lie inert before us.”
Words on symposium by Roli O’tsemaye for Contemporary And (C&). The full text can be found on C&’s website.
It was my deepest pleasure to curate this symposium, to be anchored by the support and guidance of our Planning and Advisory Committee and contributors. Now, for a quieter next few months!
Chapter three: letters from Dakar and Gorée October, 2023
For sufi saint Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), who greeted me often in interiors, city roads, and island doorways. Witnessing Bamba during my visit to Senegal became a profound repetition, dhikr, an opening toward what I assumed was displaced in me. A half-sung Sufi tradition. Hahad is the most frequently repeated word in portraits of Bamba painted by Dakar artist Pape Diop. A local spelling of one of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah, meaning “The Unique”. Pape Diop, is a mute artist responsible for refabulating Sheikh Bamba’s only known photograph taken in 1913 by French colonial authorities. The limits of photography and the potential in dhikr becomes evident in the places where Diop limns the saint’s image over and over. Occasionally, he adds portraits of revered caliphs belonging to the Sufi movement associated with Bamba. The last image here - is the unremarkable photograph of the saint. It was likely taken to “card-index” Muslim figures who could provide the local French colonial authority with surveillance measures. The saint would later become an anti-colonial figure, leading a pacifist struggle against the French. Barkè, borrowed from Arabic into Wolof, divine blessing. We are reminded.
Notes, with warmth in memory
On 25th May we participated in @tate Symposium and Festival The Archive is a Gathering Place.
Here are some moments from SITAAD presentation Letters to Giorgio and Mohamed: Entangled Biographies and Xirsi as a Counter-Archival Method.
The presentation was developed in the framework of our long-term sonic research project Transmigrating Cassettes. The second series weaves together historical sound recordings, archival traces, bureaucratic records, and critical fabulations themed on the Somali-Italian partisan Giorgio Marincola and Somali ethnographic performer and language assistant Mohamed Nur.
Responding to The Archive is a Gathering Place, we proposed a mode of gathering through the concept of sitaad, a type of devotional gathering organised by Somali women involving collective offerings, recitation and songs.
The assemblage of sounds were recorded across sites in Italy, Germany and Minneapolis. With sound design by @stillagramstill featuring vocal recordings and utterances from Giorgio Marincola, Mohamed Nur, @kombe__ , @billyfowo , Abdi Roble, Kaamil A. Haider, @blvcknotes , Antar Mohamed Marincola, Isabella Marincola and @jimcnedd .
Hosted by Tate Research and curated by @vasundhara.m with support from Tate Library and Archive. The programme recording will be available soon. Full description on our website.
Moments with the archive, the Swahili Coast, a dhow trip following my late grandfather.
Words strain under the weight of gratitude for my first research trip in East Africa: in pursuit of mid 19th century daguerreotypes of Somali, Swahili, Omani and Ethiopian sitters commissioned during a French naval mission in the region and held for the last two centuries between two Parisian museums. The final two images are taken at the Quai Branly, Paris.
There is more to come, in the vessel that is the forthcoming SITAAD publication.
Warmly,
Earlier this year, we presented Studio Sawiro: Encounters with Post-Independence Somali Studio Photography in Three Acts, at the University of Oxford’s @ruskin_school_art_oxford Contemporary Art Lecture series convened by Jennifer Martin.
The lecture formed part of our ongoing project Studio Sawiro, which interrogates the decline of photography studios in Somalia through multiple points of departure, including the region’s historical encounter with photography. It hosted a screening of Oral History Letter I: on the photographic cultures of Mogadiscio, an eight-minute conversation between Leyla and her mother, a former photo studio worker, reflecting on the matrilineal transmission of photographic knowledge and Fieldnotes On Photo Jubba, Est circa. 1956/7, a text we read on behalf of Jabir Mohamed.
In the morning, our Workshop: Un-Muting Archives Through Essay Film explored the essay film as a critical and creative methodology for re-animating colonial archives. Films referenced include Josephine Baker Watches Herself (Terri Francis, 2019) and Ethics of the Cut: Regarding Damaged Photographs from the Anthropological Surveys of Northcote Whitridge Thomas (Joshua Lean-Segun, 2024).
SITAAD
Naima and Leyla
