Philipp Schütz  

SOMALI SIGN ART

Somali Sign Art (working title) is a hybrid fine art/documentary project about sign art and sign painters in Somali towns. I have been documenting the vibrant sign art in Somaliland and the lives of self-taught sign painters for several years and plan to add photographs from Somalia and Kenya to the collection. The goal is to publish an art book about sign paintings and their creators.

Personal Project
Date: 2014–present
Categories: Photography ‧ writing
Location: Berbera & Hargeisa, Somaliland
 portfolio

Hand-painted signs in Hargeisa are beautiful, unique, and everywhere. “I never took pictures of billboards back in the US but here that’s pretty much all I photograph,” says Naqib, a returning diaspora Somali in a teahouse in downtown Hargeisa. He has lived in the West for decades and, as an outsider, is more sensitive to the mastery in the hand-painted artwork.

There are hundreds of vibrant paintings on the walls of little shops, barbers, restaurants and so on. Foreigners who visit Somaliland’s capital are often surprised by how ‘visual’ the city is. The saturation, vitality and style of the paintings are captivating from a cultural and also artistic viewpoint. A wide-open mouth showing shiny teeth outside a dentist, a lion holding a camera on the wall of a photo studio or a grocery store with the whole stock painted on its front – from Lipton Yellow Label Tea to Kellogg’s Cornflakes. The wall painting on a small neighbourhood restaurant makes one crave pasta with camel meat far more than a photograph ever could. The reason that these images speak so loudly on the streets of Hargeisa is simple – illiteracy used to be a big problem and people had to see rather than read what the respective businesses had to offer.

Hanad, one of over a dozen self-taught sign painters in Hargeisa, remembers how artists started painting on the ruins when people were returning after the civil war. Some of them even drew their history as a way to deal with their difficult past. Naqib passionately describes a long-gone painting on a school wall in the outer city showing the history of the sixties and also the planes bombing Hargeisa in 1989. “Doing art cooled them down,” says Naqib. The contrast between the vibrant paintings and rough walls and sand roads of Hargeisa, a rising but still underdeveloped city, is still striking today.

Unfortunately, artists and residents seem unaware of the beauty and uniqueness of the art on their streets. For them the paintings are just functional and they do not consider them an integral part of Hargeisa’s look – and certainly not art. On top of that, sign painting is a fading practice and often poorly designed printed signs are slowly taking over. An arty American working for the World Bank in Hargeisa quotes the Arabic proverb, “The donkey doesn’t know the value of the honey on his back.” He attaches great value to the paintings and hopes hard-working Hargeisans will grow to appreciate the rich heritage they have in what feels to many like an arduous, underpaid trade.

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