Studio Sawiro:
Oral History Letter
Studio Sawiro
Oral History Letter: Leyla's mother, Hawa S.
on the photographic cultures of Mogadiscio.
© SITAAD Archive
Oral History Letter: Leyla's mother, Hawa S.
on the photographic cultures of Mogadiscio.
© SITAAD Archive
Sawiro is the Somali name for photographs, a loanword of the arabic ﺗَﺼﻮِﻳﺮ. The ongoing artistic-research project Studio Sawiro aims to interrogate the decline of photography studios in historial Somalia, and the dispersal of these archives.
SITAAD present their first video-work on the occasion of the project’s activation.
Oral History Letter: Leyla's mother, Hawa S. on the photographic cultures of Mogadiscio is spoken in Italian between a Somali mother and her Somali-Italian daughter. The entanglement of colonial visuality and the postcolonial desires for self-representation are addressed. The daughter is today a conservator of photography, specialising in analogue formats including the cyanotype. A history of photography is traced in two directions—the matrilineal is prioritised.
Single-channel digital video, colour, sound, 8 min
Film by SITAAD
Leyla Degan
Naima Hassan
Watch here
Participation in Middle Ground:
HKW, Hargeysa International Book Fair
Reimagining the Archive
with Analogue Cassette Tapes in Somaliland
Jama Musse Jama, Hafsa Omer, and Tirsit Yetbare
Moderated by Naima Hassan (SITAAD)
Red Sea Foundation archive © Janto Djassi/Picture Me Different
The emergence of audiocassette recording technology had an indelible impact on the way that Somali literature was documented and disseminated from the 1950s onwards, making audiocassettes one of the greatest repositories not only of Somali literature, but of Somali history more generally. The need to preserve these sources before they are lost is particularly important today. The Hargeysa Cultural Centre’s (HCC) current effort to collect, catalogue, and preserve these cassettes is one important attempt at documenting this aspect of Somali speaking people’s history. The panel reflects on HCC’s efforts of digitizing, preserving, and promoting audio recordings in the ‘Nation of Poets’, and reimagines the concept of the archive restarting from the socio-historical origins of somali cassette tapes.
More details: here
Middle Ground’s collaboration with the Hargeysa International Book Fair, offers crucial insight through which to explore the ever-evolving literary traditions of the Horn of Africa to the Indian Ocean. Founded by Jama Musse Jama in 2008, the HIBF is an annual book fair organized in Somaliland. Leveraging its location in the Horn of Africa, it investigates cross-border knowledge production and dissemination by selecting and engaging with guest countries yearly through which it explores publishing practices, questions of memory, art, and archival practices, among other facets of the literary world.
Participation in Tate Symposium and Festival:
The Archive is a Gathering Place
Publish date: May 2024
Lecture-performance: Letters to Giorgio and Mohamed: Entangled Biographies and Xirsi as a Counter-Archival Method
Transmigrating Cassettes
Tate Modern, May 2024.
© SITAAD Archive
In repsonse to The Archive is a Gathering Place, SITAAD offered a mode of gathering in the archive through the concepts of sitaad, a type of devotional gathering organised by Somali women, Xirsi, a clandestine somali means of protection and the familiar audiocassette as a counter-archival instrument.
Using analogue formats to facilitate aural memory, the sonic lecture wove 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 The series is the second volume in SITAAD’s Transmigrating Cassettes project.
Acknowledgments
The cassette tape presented by SITAAD was recorded Italy, Germany, and Minneapolis with sound design by Simone Trabucchi. It features SITAAD alongside a host of voices including Antar Mohamed Marincola, Isabella Marincola,Mohamed Nur, Malik Abdi, Billy Fowo, Abdi Roble, Kaamil A. Haider, Khadija Charif, and Jim C. Nedd.
The research was supported by Somali translator Bodhari Warsame’s instrumental work on Mohamed Nur along with Annette Hoffmann’s Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918), Timira: Romanzo Meticcio by Antar Mohamed and Wu Ming 2, and Razza Partigiana by Carlo Costa and Lorenzo Teodonio. Audio excerpts were also taken from Isabella Marincola - Reading "Razza Partigiana" - Giardini Fava, Bologna. 16 June 2009, directed by Giuliana Fantoni, Lucia Pivotto, and Matteo Rossi, and the Lautarchiv, Berlin with the generous support of Dr. Christopher Li.
The Archive is a Gathering Place was hosted by Tate Research and curated by Vasundhara Mathur.
Full programme.
Publication for Afterall:
Notes on dark archives
Publish date: March 2024
Notes on dark archives: Transforming colonial photographs using alternative analogue processes
Transmigrating Cassettes
© Chicago History Museum
Departing from Erica Scourti’s concept of Dark Archives (2015), SITAAD engages the shadows cast by colonial archives by invoking Xirsi, a clandestine Somali practice of protection, and experimenting with analogue formats. Testing the concept and limits of opacity, the duo explore their use of cyanotypes and audiocassettes, partially developed through archival research and participatory workshops held in New York City and Minneapolis in 2023.
Through the lens of colonial botany and plantation economies, the cyanotype as a counter archival method is weighed against the ghost of early photographic proccesses which contributed to the racialising logic of colonial policies. In doing so, SITAAD examine the limits of using analogue processes that first ‘rendered’ colonial subjects. Speculating on community-led circulations of colonial archives, they discuss new potentials for institutional collections typically preserved as static repositories with settled narratives.
Afterall: Online issue
Fellowship Announcement:
University of Minnesota and Soomaal House of Art
Publish date: August 2023
Award: Hub Residencies
SITAAD was a recipient of 2023-2024 Soomaal House Archive Fellowship with generous support from the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub and Minnesota Transform.
In partnership with Soomaal House of Art and the Immigration History Research Center Archives, SITAAD undertook an archive-focused residency in the summer of 2023, working closely with Kaamil A. Haider, archivist and co-director of Soomaal House of Art.
About the project
Transmigrating Cassettes is a sonic container for SITAAD research interventions on dispersed colonial collections. It instrumentalises the audio cassette as an archival and discursive tool.
The first cassette series examines Augustus F. Sherman’s photography collection of Somali passengers who arrived from French Somaliland to Ellis Island Immigration Station in 1914. With the guidance of Soomaal House of Art, SITAAD will undertake collections research on the seventy-five Somali passengers, who are described in official bureaucratic records as a performing troupe who arrived for exhibition purposes. The troupe’s arrival, performances, detainment, and eventual deportation, are contained in collections across the United States. To engage the public, SITAAD will host workshops and symbolic gatherings in Minneapolis and NYC. The volume is developed with research support and guidance from Kaamil A. Haider, director of Soomaal House Library & Archive Center, and Louis Takács, initiator of the project Let Me Get There: Visualizing immigrants, transnational migrants & U.S. citizens abroad, 1904-1925.
Future iterations of the project will investigate Somali participation in the economies of international colonial exhibitions in new geographies in association with practitioners, communities, collectives, and institutions. The cassettes will map sonic strategies for transmuting colonial histories in the present and coalesces into a symphonic archive on Somali performing troupes and their itinerant trajectories across the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.
In 2024, SITAAD will endevour to make accessible Vol.1 tapes through public presentations and closed circulations.
University of Minnesota: read more
SITAAD was a recipient of 2023-2024 Soomaal House Archive Fellowship with generous support from the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub and Minnesota Transform.
In partnership with Soomaal House of Art and the Immigration History Research Center Archives, SITAAD undertook an archive-focused residency in the summer of 2023, working closely with Kaamil A. Haider, archivist and co-director of Soomaal House of Art.
About the project
Transmigrating Cassettes is a sonic container for SITAAD research interventions on dispersed colonial collections. It instrumentalises the audio cassette as an archival and discursive tool.
The first cassette series examines Augustus F. Sherman’s photography collection of Somali passengers who arrived from French Somaliland to Ellis Island Immigration Station in 1914. With the guidance of Soomaal House of Art, SITAAD will undertake collections research on the seventy-five Somali passengers, who are described in official bureaucratic records as a performing troupe who arrived for exhibition purposes. The troupe’s arrival, performances, detainment, and eventual deportation, are contained in collections across the United States. To engage the public, SITAAD will host workshops and symbolic gatherings in Minneapolis and NYC. The volume is developed with research support and guidance from Kaamil A. Haider, director of Soomaal House Library & Archive Center, and Louis Takács, initiator of the project Let Me Get There: Visualizing immigrants, transnational migrants & U.S. citizens abroad, 1904-1925.
Future iterations of the project will investigate Somali participation in the economies of international colonial exhibitions in new geographies in association with practitioners, communities, collectives, and institutions. The cassettes will map sonic strategies for transmuting colonial histories in the present and coalesces into a symphonic archive on Somali performing troupes and their itinerant trajectories across the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.
In 2024, SITAAD will endevour to make accessible Vol.1 tapes through public presentations and closed circulations.
University of Minnesota: read more
Transmigrating Cassettes Visualiser © SITAAD Archive
Residency Announcement: Neither on Land nor at Sea Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto
Publish date: May 2023
Artistic Residency: Biella, Italy
© Chiara Cartuccia, Neither on Land nor at Sea, UNIDEE Residency Programs, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto.
SITAAD participates in residency Neither on Land nor at Sea to develop their ongoing research and practice exploring Mediterranean complexities and geographical thinking, with attention to Somali mobilities.
Neither on Land nor at Sea invites to meander around unreducible complications and on shifting grounds, to explore together ways in which geography is historically, socially, and politically produced. The project pluralises Mediterranean concepts/spaces as sites of worldmaking and experimentation in communal living. To do so, it adopts un-grounded geographies and colliding historicities as meeting places, in which to congregate to elaborate on the role played by situated practices and shared processes in the promotion of social transformations, towards epistemic justice.
Neither on Land nor at Sea, research project by UNIDEE Residency Programs at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto initiated by Chiara Cartuccia.
Neither Land nor at Sea: read more
Neither on Land nor at Sea invites to meander around unreducible complications and on shifting grounds, to explore together ways in which geography is historically, socially, and politically produced. The project pluralises Mediterranean concepts/spaces as sites of worldmaking and experimentation in communal living. To do so, it adopts un-grounded geographies and colliding historicities as meeting places, in which to congregate to elaborate on the role played by situated practices and shared processes in the promotion of social transformations, towards epistemic justice.
Neither on Land nor at Sea, research project by UNIDEE Residency Programs at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto initiated by Chiara Cartuccia.
Neither Land nor at Sea: read more