About — SITAAD

^{Press enquiries, invitations and collaborations:

info.sitaad@gmail.com}

^{SITAAD is a platform and artistic collaboration
co-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 fellows of the Soomaal House Archive Fellowship supported by the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. In 2023-25, Degan and Hassan are developing a pedagogical framework for long-term projects Transmigrating Cassettes and Studio Sawiro.}

_{SITAAD emerged from a conversation between two Somali archivists at the British Library in London. Situating the Somali region as a contested zone shaped by colonial histories, linguistic multiplicities, and intersecting narratives, SITAAD critically interrogates the enduring epistemic frameworks that conflate the region with collapse, conflict, and ruin— entrenched in the aftermath of civil war and development discourses. In response, SITAAD proposes a transnational, multilingual methodology that situates the Somali region within global systems of (post)colonialism and capitalism, to advocate for alternative modes of historiographic engagement on dispersed Somali archives and cultural heritage.

Co-founders

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 a graduate of MA Photography Archiving and New Media at Bauer, Milan School of Design and Photography.

Naima Hassan is a researcher, curator, and archivist based between Berlin and London. She is the managing editor for Annotations in Four Acts (2025), a forthcoming publication emerging from her role as Associate Curator and Archivist at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos. She is also a member of the Steering Board of TheMuseumsLab and part of Nieuwe Instituut’s New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures Working Group, where her photographic research centers on Charles Gullian’s Somali Coast daguerreotypes (1846-1948). Hassan co-founded the archival platform SITAAD, dedicated to redefining the boundaries of archival practice.}