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.
Background
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 and curator based between Berlin and London. Her work bridges research, archival practice and curatorial experimentation to interrogate the politics of knowledge production, restitution, and the reimagination of archives as spaces of possibility. Since 2022, she has supported the development of the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive at G.A.S. Foundation (Lagos) as Associate Curator and Archivist. She is also a member of TheMuseumsLab Steering Board and Nieuwe Instituut’s New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures Working Group, where she is anchoring her photographic research on Charles Gullian’s Voyage à la Côte Orientale d’Afrique (1848).