Press enquiries, invitations and collaborations:
info.sitaad@gmail.com
SITAAD is an archive-focused platform co-founded by Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan in 2022. Drawing on sitaad, a type of devotional gathering organised by Somali women, the archivist duo facilitate interventions within colonial sites, museums, and archives. Inhabiting the historical terrain of former Italian, French, and British Somaliland, SITAAD maintains a focus on experimentation with analogue formats and xirsi, a clandestine Somali practice of protection. Situating the Somali region as a contested zone shaed by colonial histories, linguistic multiplicities, and intersecting narratives, they propose an archival methodology that situates the region within global histories.
Advocating for alternative, multilingual, and transnational modes of engagement with dispersed Somali archives and material culture, Degan and Hassan are Affilitate Researchers of the Soomaal House Library & Archives Center. In 2023–25, they will develop roaming iterations of their long term projects Transmigrating Cassettes and Studio Sawiro, with funding support from Soomaal House of Art and the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, and the Goethe-Institut. They have presented works at the Tate, Africa Centre NYC, Afterall, The Recovery Plan Florence, Open Resource Centre and beyond.
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. Degan co-founded the archive-focused platform SITAAD in 2022.
Naima Hassan is a researcher, curator, and archivist based between Berlin and London. She is the managing editor of 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 (1846-1848). Hassan co-founded the archive-focused platform SITAAD in 2022.
Logo design
Kaamil A. Haider
SITAAD’s logo is modelled on the letter S in the Kaddare writing system. The alphabet was invented in 1952 by Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare. It was officially recommended as the national script by the Somali Language Committee, a group of researchers and civil servants who standardized the Somali language. Subsequently, as a result of state economic restraints, the Latin alphabet was selected instead.