- Lease on Sovereignty -
Raúl Fernando
Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948 after centuries of Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule. Political independence, however, did not erase the colonial power structures and foreign influence left behind. Systems of land use, labor, trade, infrastructure, and governance continued to shape the country long after colonial rule formally ended. The effects of these inheritances remain visible in the landscapes and lives of contemporary Sri Lanka long after the end of the civil war in 2009.
Lease on Sovereignty examines these colonial afterlives through photography. Moving between fishing communities, urban spaces, plantations, transportation networks, and sites shaped by tourism and trade, the project considers how histories of extraction, ethnic division, and foreign influence remain embedded within everyday life.
Sri Lanka is my father's homeland, and I first began thinking about these questions while photographing there in 2024 during a visit to my grandmother. Returning to communities and places I encountered throughout childhood, I became attentive to the ways different histories and belief systems coexist: Buddhist iconography beside Hindu kovils, Catholic ritual interwoven with seafaring labor, and colonial infrastructure continuing to structure contemporary movement and livelihood.
The photographs that follow are the groundwork for this ongoing investigation into the country’s layered history. Rather than seeing and feeling Sri Lanka as either a tourist bureau landscape or a singular political narrative, I seek to photograph the country as both lived reality and historical terrain. My family home, where the remnants of colonialism, the consequences of war, and the pressures of modernization exist congruently.