Sirta Ereyga (The Secret of the Word)

With Idel Rasheed & Ibrahim Hirsi

Sirta Ereyga (The Secret of the Word) is a workshop series exploring the synergy between Somali oral poetry and cinema, treating voice as a living archive. In Somali culture, the spoken word is a vital tool for preserving history and collective memory; this workshop examines how that tradition evolves within contemporary storytelling.

By pairing selected poetry with archival film footage from the 1980s, the series illustrates how oral performance and cultural transmission have adapted to visual media. Participants will analyze examples of Somali cinema to see how rhythm, narration, and silence function as extensions of spoken traditions rather than departures from them.

Open to the public with no prior background required, the workshop emphasizes active listening to understand how stories are shared across time. It creates a communal space to celebrate storytelling as an ever-evolving process. (Idel Rasheed)

Idel Rasheed is a Berlin-based archivist, curator and founder of Waaberi Phone, a digital platform and archive dedicated to the preservation of Somali arts and culture. Her work is rooted in cultural memory and archival research, utilizing archival imagery, and sound to explore the continuity of Somali identity across generations. She is also a co-founder of Koor Archives, a platform focused on the retrieval and restitution of Somali materials.

Ibrahim Hirsi is a London-based writer, archivist, and editor at Journal Gobanimo and co-founder of Koor Archives. His work appears in The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PBLJ, and Before Them, We (Flipped Eye, 2022), and he is currently writing a monograph on the metre of southern Somali poetic forms.

The workshop is free. Sign up online by 28.03.2026.

Sign up form link