Everyday Sudan

Focusing on everyday cultural practices, this panel explores the lived experience of Sudan, foregrounding how the ordinary holds space for creative expression and intergenerational exchange. Bringing together artists, designers, and anthropologists, the session highlights how the daily routines of dressing, adorning, and sharing culinary heritage contribute to cultural memory and preservation. Moving beyond the headlines and focusing on the daily, this panel highlights the culture of tradition and ceremony as well as individual agency, emphasizing how they shape Sudan’s living heritage.

Speakers:

Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz is a researcher focusing on cultural understandings of health and well-being, how the sociopolitical impinges on constructions of identity and how these elements give life to diverse sociocultural manifestations in multiple domains of social life. She works on the problematic of the diversity of Sudanese identities from the vantage point of the social and the political, to elucidate how it impacts processes of exclusion, marginalization, difference, belonging, and becoming. She is the coauthor of Shifting Terrains of Political Participation in Sudan: Elements Dating from the Second Colonial (1898-1956) Period to the Contemporary Era (2021).

Mohammed Elmur (Simba) is a costume designer whose work has contributed to the Sudanese fashion movement with a number of avant-garde costume lines. He is also deeply involved in Sudan’s growing film industry by designing for a number of Sudanese productions, including You Will Die at Twenty (2019); Al-Sit (2020); Goodbye Julia (2023); and Cotton Queen (2025). He is also a filmmaker, with works that include the experimental fashion film Alfundug (2021). Through his practice, he explores how fabric, memory, and identity intersect within visual storytelling, using costume as a language to honor and reinterpret Sudanese narratives on screen. His work bridges tradition and contemporary expression, capturing the spirit of Sudan with a distinctive artistic eye. He continues to advocate for authentic storytelling within Sudanese cinema, while expanding his exploration of costume design within African and Arab film landscapes.

Omer Eltigani is a Sudanese chef and author. He is a hospital pharmacist; however, due to the lack of representation of Sudanese food online and in the UK, he decided to become a chef to bring attention to Sudanese cuisine. He authored the essay “Humble Salt: Archiving the Sudanese Kitchen,” which appeared in After Memory: Essays on the Sudanese Archive. He is the author of the The Sudanese Kitchen cookbook.

Omnia Abbas Shawkat is a creative and humanitarian media projects and sustainability manager and trainer. She is one of two founders of Andariya, a bilingual digital multimedia cultural platform, research and cross-cultural enterprise launched in 2015 in Sudan and in the East and Horn of Africa in 2021.

Moderator:

Amna Elidrissy is an architect specializing in living heritage curation and exhibition design. As a key member of Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH), she contributes to mapping, research, and curation efforts, developing datasets that document Sudan’s historical and cultural narratives.