Frazer Hay in conversation with Rashad Salim and Hannah Lewis, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
On a grey morning in early March, I arrived at the home of Rashad Salim and Hannah Lewis in Camberwell, south London, to talk about boats, memory, Iraq and cultural heritage.
Rashad and Hannah are the co-founders of Safina Projects CIC, a creative studio working to protect and revive the endangered craft heritage of Iraq, particularly its ancient boats, through reconstruction, documentation, art and public engagement in Iraq and internationally. Safina means ship, or ark, in Arabic. The name is apt. Their work is about boat-related cultural heritage, certainly, but also about what the culture around boats and their communities makes possible: movement, exchange, survival, return, connection.
And connection, more than anything else, was the thread that ran through our conversation.
Safina Projects is rooted in the understanding that Iraq is, fundamentally, a river society. Its watercraft and maritime heritage are not marginal curiosities but part of the country’s cultural bloodstream. Yet this heritage has been fractured by decades of conflict, environmental degradation, displacement and the erosion of water-based lifeways. Boats have disappeared. Skills have faded. Relationships between people and waterways have weakened. In some places, even the living memory of working boats has begun to vanish.
What Rashad and Hannah are trying to do is not simply document that loss. They are trying to reverse it.
Their work gathers what remains (stories, skills, forms, materials, memories) and reconnects it to present communities in Iraq, to younger generations, and to the Iraqi diaspora. In that sense, Safina Projects is not only about preservation. It is about rebuilding relationships: between people and water, culture and environment, past and future, Iraq and Britain.
The project’s scale and ambition are unmistakable. But what struck me first was that both Rashad and Hannah speak about heritage not as an abstract category, but as something felt early, bodily and spatially, in childhood.
Hannah grew up mainly in Slough, but her earliest years were shaped by a more unusual environment. Her father was a gardener at Cliveden House, and some of her first memories are of the grounds there: plants, seasons, isolation, and the River Thames at the bottom of the cliffs beyond the garden. ‘I was around plants a lot more than people,’ she told me. She was an only child for those first years, living in a place where landscape and atmosphere seemed to leave a deeper imprint than crowds or noise.
After her father passed away when she was young, her life changed course. Her mother, a librarian, became another quiet influence. Hannah grew up around books and libraries, spending time after school in spaces shaped by stories, order and concentration. She describes herself as a creative and introverted child, imaginative, happy in her own company, writing stories and drawing pictures. Museums were part of that world too: the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum were among the great excitements of childhood trips to London.
It is not difficult to see how those early experiences shaped the person she became. Gardens, water, stories, books, museums, quiet observation: these are not superficial details, but part of the foundation of how she learned to pay attention.
Rashad’s early life, by contrast, was marked by movement across countries, languages and political worlds. Born in Khartoum to an Iraqi father and a German mother, he grew up within the orbit of the Diplomatic Corps. His father was opening embassies internationally; his mother, father and maternal grandfather were all artists. Very early on, Rashad was living within a world of travel, negotiation and cultural transition.
His first experience of culture and language, he told me, was in China. Later came Iraq, then Sweden, then other places. His description of childhood was striking: a matter of ‘negotiating one’s own presence within a place,’ and of environmental and cultural dialogue. Language itself had to be negotiated. Identity had to be negotiated. So did the emotional experience of moving from one place to another, of entering new schools, of returning to Iraq after years in international settings.
When I asked him which building or place first struck him as profoundly cultural, he answered immediately: the Forbidden City in Beijing, specifically, the Marble Boat. He remembered it vividly: the material, the scale, the strangeness of it, a boat on the water made of marble, like a pavilion. It was one of his strongest early memories. Even then, it seems, the image of the boat had already lodged somewhere deep.
Water, in fact, recurred again and again in both their accounts. Hannah remembered hours spent as a child in Lyme Regis, squatting by a stream in a guesthouse garden, building little dams from stones and watching leaves zigzag through the current. Rashad spoke of being happiest by the sea, and of powerful childhood memories of forests, snow and seasonal landscapes in Sweden and China. Both seemed drawn, from early on, to environments where movement, observation and ecology meet.
That sensitivity to the environment now lies at the heart of Safina Projects.
For Hannah, the path to co-founding the project ran through design, community organising and experimental making. She worked on a British Council exhibition in China about design and climate change, seen by a quarter of a million people. She helped develop the Brixton Pound, the UK’s first urban local currency. Between 2010-2016 she co-founded the Remakery in Brixton, a community workshop and reuse space created in what had once been a derelict, fly-tipped council site beneath a block of garages.
That project matters in understanding her. The Remakery was not simply a managed initiative. It was something she helped bring into being through communicating a vision, gathering stakeholders, raising funds, obtaining permission and creating the conditions for others to make and work. It was a social, material and practical act of transformation: waste turned into resource, dereliction into enterprise, scattered skills into a community.
There is a striking continuity between that and her earlier experience at the age of 22 in Soweto, at a grassroots project called the Mountain of Hope during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. There, she watched an artist help catalyse a self-organising community effort around food, gardens, creative recycling workshops and public space. That memory stayed with her: a project with momentum, not wholly planned in advance, but emergent, collective and alive.
You can feel that same sensibility in the way she speaks about Safina Projects now. Rashad calls it ‘expeditionary art.’ Hannah thinks of it as emergent: not fixed in every detail beforehand, but developing through opportunities, relationships and discoveries along the way.
Rashad’s route into Safina Projects was shaped by art, family history and an earlier, almost mythic adventure. As a young man, he joined the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s Tigris expedition in the late 1970s, sailing in an experimental vessel built in Iraq to explore ancient connections between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. It was a remarkable beginning, part maritime experiment, part political statement, part lesson in what a boat can mean beyond transport.
But even before that expedition, boats had a pull. Rashad had already been making models of Heyerdahl’s vessels when he was at an international school. Later, as an artist, he became interested in Iraqi coracles and in the broader culture surrounding humble boats in post-conflict Iraq. Not boats as an academic speciality, at least not initially, but as a living cultural form, one carrying memory, material intelligence and ecological knowledge.
This distinction matters. Throughout our conversation, Rashad returned to the idea that Safina Projects was never only about research. It was also about imagination.
When Professor John Cooper of Exeter University first connected with him around a project called The Ark Reimagined, there was clearly academic interest. Iraq, after all, represents a major gap in the field of maritime cultural heritage. Forty years or more of conflict and breakdown had left that field underdeveloped or absent. Yet Rashad could not engage with it only as a scholar’s topic. He wanted the broader picture: the culture around the boats, the people, the conditions, the disappearing practices, the artistic and social possibilities.
At first, the project had to be scoped through their own efforts and resources. Hannah was clear that the necessary groundwork often had to come from their own pockets before others fully grasped the importance of what was at stake. When support from the Cultural Protection Fund eventually came, it was transformative. Rashad described it as freedom, not only money, but creative and expeditionary freedom. The ability to proceed with trust, with imagination still intact.
That is an important distinction, and one they both returned to repeatedly. Their appreciation of CPF was not simply that it funded them, but that it understood something others often missed.
For Rashad, the Fund showed greater openness to living heritage than many larger institutions. Not only monumental heritage, archaeological sites or officially sanctioned grand narratives, but the smaller, humbler, more fragile cultural forms that sit closer to everyday life. Boats. Skills. Watercraft traditions. Scouting. Craft practices. Environmental knowledge. Youth clubs. Social habits. Culture as something lived, not only admired.
Hannah made a similar point. Heritage, she suggested, is still too often understood primarily in terms of the tangible: monumental sites, archaeology, UNESCO-type categories. But so-called intangible heritage (living craft, practice, vernacular knowledge) has been growing in importance. Part of that growth, she argued, is because organisations such as the Cultural Protection Fund have helped create spaces where these conversations can happen and these stories can be told.
When I asked why this broader attention to living heritage is increasing now, Rashad answered passionately: ‘ Because we are losing it’.
He introduced a term I had not heard before: solastalgia. Nostalgia is missing a place after you have left it, he explained. Solastalgia is the grief of losing the place while you are still in it, the loss of familiar cultural and environmental reference points in real time. It is an extraordinarily useful word for the era we are in, and for understanding the kind of work Safina Projects is doing. Their concern is not simply that Iraqi boat heritage once existed and might be missed. It is that it is actively disappearing now, under the pressure of conflict, ecological change and cultural fragmentation.
For both Rashad and Hannah, this cannot be separated from the wider violence Iraq has endured. And by violence, they mean more than war in the narrow sense. They spoke of social violence, ecological violence, generational breakage and environmental disruption. Conflict destroys not only buildings and institutions, but connections between ministries, between communities, between generations, between people and waterways, between cultural practice and ecological setting.
Iraq, Rashad argued, is a place where these connections have been broken on multiple levels. Syria, he noted, has joined it in that regard. In such a context, a boat becomes much more than a vessel. It becomes a connective form. A way of thinking about how a society once moved, traded, gathered, learned and understood itself.
This is why their work now extends far beyond remaking historical craft. One of the most striking developments in Safina Projects has been the creation of water clubs and the idea of water scouts in Iraq. Not naval cadets, not military structures, but a new kind of youth engagement built around waterways, ecology, culture and practical learning. They now have clubs developing from Mosul to Basra, with hundreds of young people already involved or touched by the work.
The ambition here is long-term. It is educational, ecological and cultural at once. It involves ministries of water, environment, youth and sport. It touches museums, universities, local clubs and diaspora networks. It is, in every sense, connective. Rashad was clear that this is what the future requires: not isolated interventions, but structures that reconnect systems which have been forced apart.
Again, this is where they see the Cultural Protection Fund playing a distinctive role. What they value most is not only its reach but its balance: enough bureaucratic structure to function effectively, but enough humanity and flexibility to listen, adapt and remain close to the grassroots. Rashad contrasted this with larger technocratic organisations he has worked with, including parts of the UN system, which can feel overly top-down. CPF, by contrast, seemed to them more open to lived reality, to emergent thinking and to projects that do not fit neat institutional templates.
Hannah spoke with quiet clarity about the role CPF can continue to play in shaping narratives and conversations, not merely issuing grants. Rashad pushed this further, imagining networks, congresses, working papers, stronger links between academic institutions, ministries, diaspora communities and cultural organisations. In their view, CPF’s future lies not only in funding projects but in helping connections happen, across sectors, disciplines and geographies.
That point feels central to the Safina Projects' story. Because beneath the specifics of Iraqi boats and watercraft lies a larger question: how can cultural heritage help repair broken worlds?
At one point, I asked, very directly, why they cared so much about heritage. Rashad answered as an artist: it has to do with beauty and truth. Hannah answered differently but in a complementary way: these things are fundamental to who we are as humans. She also drew a link between modern Iraqi art and the local, vernacular life from which it grew. Mentioning a well-known local quote, ‘the source of art is in the life of a people,’ an inscription inlaid on the floor of the South London Gallery by Walter Crane in 1897 she suggested that what Safina Projects is trying to protect is not simply an object or technique, but the relationship between art, culture and everyday life itself. In Iraq, that life has been disrupted so profoundly that the cultural ground from which art and making emerge has been fragmented, almost destroyed.
Rashad added another striking dimension to this: in some respects, Britain now holds more of the archival memory of Iraqi watercraft than Iraq itself does. Archives, museums, military collections, photographs, ethnographic records, these are often more accessible now, through digitisation and the internet, even as the living culture itself disappears. It is a painful paradox: the records blossom just as the practice fades.
This is where diaspora becomes crucial.
