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.

Framing the audio cassette as an archival and discursive tool

_{Transmigrating Cassettes Iterations. Courtesy of SITAAD Archive and The Recovery Plan.} 

1. A cyanotype is a cameraless printing formulation that involves laying a photographic print on a piece of plain (uncoated) paper, on which the image is composed of a blue pigment. The paper is sensitised with ferric (iron) salts. A yellow-brown image prints out during the exposure to the light. During the subsequent washing and drying, the image intensifies and is converted to a prussian blue pigment. See Lavédrine 2009.


2. The National Archives and Records Administration: Barnum & Bailey 53939-36b case files cover various issues concerning the troupe’s activities in the United States, including labour agreements with Barnum & Bailey contractors and legal correspondences, and later their deportations, arrests and their stays in detainee centres. The files also include several correspondences between government officials and Barnum Bailey contractors, along with testimonies. A finding aid was created to support the Transmigrating Cassettes Public Programme in Minneapolis, held at the University of Minnesota and Soomaal House. SITAAD worked with archive intern Hodan Hassan to produce finding aid.


3. “Descansos, resting places. You’ll also find them on the edges of cliffs along particularly scenic but dangerous roads in Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean countries. Sometimes crosses are clustered in twos or threes or fives. People’s names are inscribed upon them, sometimes the names are spelled out in nails, sometimes they’re painted on the wood or carved into it […] To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths, las muertes, chiquitas, and the big deaths, las muertes grandotas, have taken place. […] I encourage you to make descansos, to sit down with a time-line of your life and say “where are the places that must be remembered and blessed?”, Clarissa Pinkola Estés.


4. See IX Somalis [Portrait of a seated man, bust, with the body in three-quarter view and the head in profile] Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858 – 1924), Gelatin-silver bromide negative on glass plate. Quai Branly Museum Digital Collection.

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SITAAD Studio

SITAAD Studio hosts offline projects, gatherings, public programmes, print offerings, and reading rooms, with the aim of pluralising forms of research and study on Somali collections. The studio’s opening durational public activation will be presented in Italy in October 2026.
 

_{Leyla Degan  © SITAAD Archive}