About — SITAAD

^{Contact: info.sitaad@gmail.com}

^{SITAAD is a platform and artistic collaboration

founded by Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan in 2022}
^{Under the name sitaad, a type of devotional gathering organised by Somali women, the archivist duo facilitate social and artistic interventions within colonial sites, museums, and archives. Inhabiting the historical terrain of former Italian, French and British Somaliland, SITAAD experiment with analogue formats and xirsi, a clandestine Somali practice of protection to recast colonial archives. They are current Hub Residencies Fellows at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota in association with Soomaal House of Art. In the course of their expanded 2023-24 fellowship, Degan and Hassan are developing a pedagogical framework for their long-term projects Transmigrating Cassettes and Studio Sawiro.}

_{Leyla Degan is a Somali-Italian based artist and researcher based in Milan. She works across the borders of photography archives, visual arts and field research. She focuses her practice on colonial archives and restitution in relation to Somalia, with an emphasis on Somali women as the point of her research. In 2023 she was an artist-archivist in residence at the Black History Month in Florance at Numeroventi held by the Recovery Plan/YGBI. She later exhibited at the Acre Hub and in 2024 exhibited her works Habaryar and Intaan Noohalay as part of Curating Black Art in Italy at Soho House in Rome. She is an incoming graduate of MA Photography Archiving and New Media at Bauer, Milan School of Design and Photography.}
_{Naima Hassan is a researcher and curator, who works primarily with archives. Her current research focuses on the affective registers of sonic carceral archives, with an emphasis on the visual and acoustic traces of Somali ethnographic performers (1885–1930). Since 2022, she has led the development of the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive at G.A.S. Foundation Lagos as Associate Curator and Archivist. Under the foundation’s multi-year programme Re:assemblages, she aims to connect the collections to a transnational network of communities, artists, scholars, and institutions. With an interest in building infrastructures for research on African cultural collections, Hassan is a member of TheMuseumsLab's Steering Committee and Nieuwe Instituut's Indian Ocean Working Group.}