Nada Atieg: The activist embodying spirit and cultural healing

Nada Atieg is a journalist, cultural worker, and organiser prompting revolutionary thought beyond the living realm. Based in Zurich, Nada’s work is crucial in reestablishing narratives expunged from cultural consciousness by colonial forces, edifying the value of these time-honoured practices in today’s search for identity, autonomy, and healing. 

The binding factor of Nada’s work is the concept of collective care—particularly in how pre-Islamic spiritualities may function as forms of resistance and collective emancipation. The ceremonies she studies and helps preserve are intricate affairs involving coffee sessions, divination circles, ritualised trance, and sacrificial rites.” My focus lies in exploring how these spiritual practices can inform our daily rituals and cultural practices—through folklore, rites of passage, olfactory heritage, and more,” Nada explains to Dazed MENA. “In Sudan, under colonial rule and state-imposed Islamisation, many indigenous practices were demonised and ridiculed to the point where they became taboo.”

One such practice, explains Nada, is Zar; a belief system and spirit possession ritual that has long been suppressed in recent history. “Its early practitioners were mostly enslaved people that proliferated their knowledge and memories across the so-called MENA region,” Nada expounds. “Despite its marginalisation, Zar remains deeply woven into Sudanese life, particularly in how we interact with the spirit world… Personally, I’ve always felt a connection to the spirit world, and Zar has given me a language to explore that.”

Zar practice persists covertly in Sudanese rituals today, including in the use of bakhoor, in wedding traditions, music, and wider cultural phenomena. “Sudanese culture has long expressed resistance and resilience through music, poetry, and storytelling,” Nada  tells us. “Zar reflects this through its ceremonies, blending myth, performance, and ritual. It centres communal healing, collective imagination, and rituals of protection, care, and beauty. It continues to offer powerful ways of organising and strategies of intervention.”

Nada’s research on the belief system prompted the inception of House of Lolia—a space for reflection, collective rituals, and the craftsmanship of traditional products like bakhoor and mabakher. The project is named after a formidable female spirit in the Zar pantheon, embodying attributes that patriarchal systems have long dreaded in women: independence, passion, beauty, and valour. Like its namesake, House of Lolia interrogates conventional power structures, most recently through a collaborative tarot deck created with 21 Sudanese artists who reimagined traditional cards through the lens of Zar symbolism. “Together, we reimagined the traditional tarot cards and interpreted them through photographs that incorporate Sudanese Zar symbolism.”

Her recent work in AZEEMA magazine is the evocative, Scent is the Food of Souls, a piece that explores how traditional practices like the burning of bakhoor become tools for decolonising faith and honouring ancestral wisdom. The simple act of burning a scent becomes a way of carrying memory and tradition into the future. “By reclaiming and revitalising these spiritualities and practices, I try to tap into the region’s rich history of storytelling, oral traditions, music, and collective resistance,” Nada voices. “I aim to open up conversations about spiritual and cultural autonomy while exploring how these suppressed traditions can inspire new forms of resistance, collective healing, and social organisation today.”

Nada’s work as a journalist and organiser bleeds tenaciously into her spiritual practice, with the latter informing modes of modern political resistance, “As an organiser, investigative journalist, and radio host at a militant leftist community radio station, these interests come together in a complementary—and sometimes unexpectedly humorous—way,” she says. Nada explains that overlooked subversive cultures, including that of the Zar community, possess remarkable promise for prefigurative organising and community life. “Resistance can emerge in unusual places, such as Zar songs used during the Sudanese revolution of 2018, that praise the spirits for defeating state institutions and ushering in a civilian rule.”

Her writing persistently underscores this intersectionality. Nada’s recent piece, Like Sunflowers Do, written for the West Asian and North African Women’s Art Library (WANAWAL), looks at the 2018 Sudanese revolution as an “archive of care,” chronicling how grassroots organisations created networks of mutual aid across Sudan that persist even now, as the country faces its largest displacement crisis in history. In her contribution to Watery Stories—an anthology presented at the Biennale Architettura in 2023—was an essay titled Tracing the Red Wind, examining how Zar rituals create their own world through sound and community, forming a living archive of cultural memory and resistance. Archiving—whether through spiritual practice, revolutionary action, or artistic expression—runs deep through her work, a form of self–defence in the protection of collective memory. 

Currently, Nada is breaking new ground, developing projects involving clay, music, and a podcast series investigating prison abolition. These seemingly disparate pursuits are united by the belief that radical cultures and ways of thought hold the seeds of new forms of collective healing. Nada’s goal through all of this? Cultivating bonds that stretch through time and space—into the spiritual realm—to make space for rediscovering decolonised iterations of healing practices. “Internally, I strive to deepen my connection with ancestral cosmologies and belief systems that have provided me with invaluable guidance,” Nada shares. “Externally, I focus on connecting with others and building community, which has been guiding a force throughout my work.”

With Sudan continuing to face unprecedented atrocities, Nada’s work signifies that revolution takes many forms. Sometimes it’s taking to the streets in united outrage—others, it’s the embrace of spiritual discovery, exhuming forgotten rituals that have withstood colonial erasure. There’s strength in this philosophy of Nada’s; like the sunflowers, she writes, her people turn toward each other in times of darkness, finding in ancient practices the strength to envision new futures.