The documentary of my first ambitious exhibition.

‘Self Portraits’

Saskia Fernando gallery, Colombo

January 2017.

Fences

When I was a child I was thrilled by the running fences on both sides of a moving vehicle. A fence is made to give a sense of protection and demarcate the boundaries between us and the other, private and public. In Jaffna, there is a long history of neighbors and relatives fighting with each other over disputes connected to boundaries and fences. In the Thesavalamai law of Jaffna, which was compiled during Dutch rule, there are regulations connected to making and maintaining fences . But the relationship between the fence and me became personal when my family was expelled from our native village Vasavillan, because of the expansion of the boundaries of the military high-security-zone.

During the 1995 exodus from Jaffna, when I was five years old, my family moved to Vavuniya. There, I was surrounded by several kinds of fences. Every day I was kept waiting for many hours with my family, in front of a police station fence, for the renewal of our temporary residential pass to live in Vavuniya. People used roofs of the school where they found shelter, to build small fences to protect their little gardens in the refugee camp. Some people made fences near the tube well as a screen to have a bath. After few years of life in refugee camp, we were settled in government sponsored housing scheme, where we made new fences.

When I travelled to Jaffna for my University education I encountered massive military fences with power and aggression. Now the government has released a number of lands belong to civilians from military controlled high security zones in the North. But the military occupation had led to the removal of fences of individual properties and to the erasure of boundaries. That produced new tension among the resettlers. There are many disputes now regarding the identification of earlier boundaries. Many people still carry the sense of displacement even after they were allowed to resettle on their own land, because they are unable to connect the boundaries in their land deeds with the actual location. In Tamil ‘veli’ means fence; veli is also traditionally associated with the boundaries of ‘respectable’ woman.

Medium-Pen on paper

14.5x76cm