Xusuus Sahmis// Scouting Memory is part of a larger and ongoing project that intends to capture the experiences of thirteen young Muslim and Somali-American women, Minnesotans now, with Somali roots. The project will culminate in a traveling exhibition and a concise companion book. The exhibition will feature larger than life, black-and-white photographic portraits as well as a multi-media video installation in which the women share their journeys to Minnesota and the conflicts they feel in trying to find a place of their own in a social and cultural sense. In addition, the multi-media video installation will include excerpts from conversations with the mothers of the featured women. To provide an in-depth portrait of these women, it is essential to include the discourse between mothers and daughters to underscore parallels and differences between the lives the mothers had in Somalia, and the lives their daughters now stand to encounter here in America.

At present, Xusuus Sahmis//Scouting Memory contains studio portraits of six out of the thirteen women and an aggregate of color photographs they took of the interiors of their homes. Almost all of the photographs of the interior spaces were taken with a camera phone after the initial studio portraits were made. The women authored these photographs to explore home, not just as a physical space, but as a source and abode that provides a connection to a common heritage. Home is an intimate yet evolving space that gives bearing and meaning to our lives; a theater with all its accouterments wherein relationships are negotiated and redefined between those who live there and with the outside world. Furthermore, the objects we accumulate within the confines of this space, beyond just being material enhancements in the homes, act as repositories of meaning that facilitate emotional connections to a past in order to maintain a link to a collective identity and memory.

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