Solar noon, the midpoint between sunrise and sunset, is when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky in a specific location’s meridian and when shadows cast in that location are at their shortest. It is also most likely the hottest time of the day, where in many places, people take a rest from the outside environment and social encounters are interiorised. The time changes with the earth’s rotation and is unique to each site.
The project Solar Noon aims to offer moments of communion, conversation and conviviality as a way of connecting and creating fertile ground for new imaginaries around gathering to take hold. In gatherings or so-called murmurations, Sagal Farah opens up the space for conversation and connections around Somali life lived in, around, and with built environments and architectures in the diasporan experience and in Somalia.
By their very nature, Murmurations are a moment of call and response between the bodies of Starlings, migratory birds. Often projected as wild scatterings of birds, their movements are in fact orchestrated motions coordinated in communion between the members of the bodies that are part of a greater whole as they create a room where they flow together and communicate and where the environment flows through them. In the Milano murmurations, she will consider how we connect, gather, leave our marks and archive our encounters. The artist is exploring this through the lens of the Somali experience, and this research chapter happens primarily through encounters with the Somali diaspora in Milano. Her studio will function as a meeting point, a place of rest and respite at Solar noon, when the sun is at its highest point on the zenith and when the shadows cast and live under are at their very shortest.
This continuation of her research, Solar Noon was conceived during my first visit to Mogadishu, Somalia (her place of birth) in November last year where she was faced with the legacy of Italian colonialism in the form of architecture, monuments and city planning that interacts with Somali everyday life.
Sagal Farah (b. Mogadishu, Somalia) is a writer, curator and educator whose interests primarily grapple with migration, geopoetics and multilinguality and how built environments, flora, fauna, and the sonic impact the migratory body. Language and writing underpin her practice, but her work has previously also manifested as installation of personal and public archive material, image making and sound, to attest to entangled of narratives and the importance of the specific, when mapping historical, contemporary and future trajectories.
Sagal Farah is one of the winners of Birds of Passage, the #SameSameCall for residencies by BASE, Moleskine Foundation and ashikọ and curated by Mistura Allison.
#SameSameCalls are promoted by BASE Milano, each time with different partners, to narrate the plurality, including people of every age, ability, gender and race. Taking these four dimensions into account as one single intersection means weaving the lives of about 8 billions of people living on the planet, and the need of traversal and inclusive representation.
This project won the public call “Creative Living Lab – 4th edition”, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.