Locale: Advocating for Sudan’s Fragile Creative Scene

In 2016, Aala Sharfi, Nafisa Eltahir, Qutouf Elobaid, Rund Al Arabi, and Safwa Hashim Mohammed founded Locale out of a simple, necessary need: a lack of art infrastructure in Sudan. “There was so much unchannelled creative energy and so little infrastructure to hold it,” recall the young creatives. The country lacked spaces where artists, researchers, and designers could collaborate, experiment, and critically engage with one another’s work. 

Locale emerged as a modest platform for artistic dialogue and has since evolved into one of Sudan’s most important creative laboratories, now based and scattered around the Gulf. Its practice moves fluidly between disciplines—curating exhibitions, producing books, and designing collaborative projects that weave art, studies, and preservation together. That purpose reached its peak during the 2019 Sudanese revolution. “It reminded us that creative spaces aren’t just about expression, but what Sudan could look like when we are free to create, interrogate, and grow, too,” they state. 

The collective’s work is grounded in Sudan’s incredibly rich canon – literary, musical, and artistic – and fuelled by conversation and slow investigation. “Given the state of affairs, the ruptures, and the many fires burning around us, it’s more important than ever that we advocate for one another through our work,” they add. Locale’s defining moment came with its inaugural exhibition, This Will Have Been, which launched in December 2019, right as the country entered its transitional period. 

The project became an early confrontation with the challenges surrounding the Sudanese archive: who has access to it, who controls its narrative, and how history can be reclaimed through art. “Who holds the right to collect, interpret, and narrate Sudan’s cultural memory?” ask the co-founders. For Locale, writing and representing their own stories is an act of agency, resistance, and self-definition. 

Though the war has fractured their geographical anchor, they continue to engage with a global Sudanese audience through zines, exhibitions, books, and collaborations like After Memory, a publication that gathered voices from across the diaspora. “Each collaboration is a way of learning and expanding our frame of reference,” they say. “It’s how we document, connect, and keep the conversation alive.”

Right now, the collective feels a responsibility to give the last few transformative years the weight and nuance they deserve. They are committed to making sure that Sudanese artists aren’t “pigeonholed” into practices of strife and struggle, advocating for work that is liberated, personal, and representative of the full spectrum of Sudanese experiences. “With the war unfolding in Sudan, change feels beyond our hands,” they admit. “Our focus is staying present, available, and attentive to Sudanese people and their stories.” For them, creativity is a form of care, a way to document a history still being written.

This desire for honesty extends to the entire regional art scene. Locale hopes the SWANA cultural scene becomes more intersectional, confronting racial and social biases. “The need for conversations with Black and Brown people around their positionality and lived experiences is loud and urgent,” they assert.

They’re now deep in the next phase of their practice, developing a series of academic papers on the Sudanese archive in collaboration with Sudan Memory, building intricate narratives around preservation and access while creating practical toolkits for future researchers. Simultaneously, Locale is preparing a long-awaited return to exhibition making, a format they describe as both expansive and generous: “It allows research, storytelling, and encounter to coexist in a way that feels alive and participatory.”