The  research project Studio Sawiro interrogates the decline of photography studios in Somalia through multiple departures, including the region’s historical encounter with  photography. Tracing discarded, displaced, and destroyed Somali photography studios following the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991, the project focuses will manifest in various chapters, beginning with a print publication.  

Tracing discarded, displaced, and destroyed Somali photography studios following the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991, alongside Somalia’s material entanglement in histories of ‘colonial epistemicide’, it is particularly concerned with early historical photography collections — including coastal daguerreotypes of Somali, Swahili, Omani and Ethiopian sitters produced by French explorer Charles Guillain (1846–1948) as part of the French imperial naval efforts during the mid-19th century, along with those produced in contemporary and vernacular settings. Its curatorial framework departs from Fazil Moradi's reading of catastrophic art as works of spectral inheritance that interrupt rhetorical and legal registers, keeping the past infinitely open.

The earliest surviving photograph was taken by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during a period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura. In 1829 Niépce entered into formal partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Daguerre later introduced his "Daguerreotype" process in 1839. Twenty years after Niépce’s photographic experiment, French naval officer Charles Guillain undertook the maritime expedition Voyage à la Côte Orientale d’Afrique (1846–48), commissioned by the French government. The mission resulted in one of the earliest photographic collections depicting communities along the East African coast of the Indian Ocean. Guillain’s daguerreotypes portray people and places in Somali ports such as Ras Hafun—site of the ancient proto-Somali city of Opone—as well as Mogadishu, Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar. These images are among the earliest known photographs produced in the region, and indeed among the earliest on the African continent. The surviving collection is held today at the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris.

Organised in three thematic clusters, the project centres on participatory methodologies and the reimagining of archival practices. The project will engage collaborators and the public through experimental workshops, archival essays, architectural sketches, and oral histories. This approach not only preserves Somali photographic histories but also brings them to life for contemporary discourse, challenging colonial legacies and reframing memory production in the present.