They come from North

With They come from North Kaiya Collective, in collaboration with Terzo Paesaggio, 5e6, and Pianoterra Foundation, continues the research on artistic languages, territories, and imaginaries explored within the production of the feature film Still Here by Suranga Katugampala.
The residency, in line with Kaiya Collective's philosophy, responds to a disobedient creative urgency, detached from an economic system and neocolonial mechanisms that exploit artists from the Global South. The entire operation, collectively conceived, relies on a lightweight organizational structure and a sustainable budget, initially entirely self-financed.
The artist's work becomes a magnetic force for a temporary constellation that connects realities rooted in the territory and active in urban and cultural redevelopment with outsiders not yet intercepted by institutions, funders, or artistic and cultural circuits.
During the residency, Prasad Hettiarachchi will not only engage with artistic and cultural subjects but also interface with the Sri Lankan diasporic circuit, with which he will design a public art workshop.

They come from North
Exhibition by Prasad Hettiarachchi

Critical notes

A refined and engaged artist, Hettiarachchi has been observing and representing the major social and urban transformations caused by Indian and Chinese neo- colonization of Sri Lanka for years. The Visitors (They) come from a North that no longer represents, or at least not only, the former European colonizers or the United States, but rather new world powers like China and India interested in exploiting Sri Lanka's natural and social resources, a central hub for the New Silk Road. The generative focus of the artist's entire research is Colombo, particularly the impact of recent urban and architectural development on the island's capital. They come from North includes a selection of the artist's production from 2019 to the most recent works.

The arrangement of the works in the exhibitions in Milan, Rome, and Brescia uses different display devices to highlight the multiple levels of interpretation and enjoyment of the artworks. First, the cinematic dimension is present in the form of transparencies in some works, allowing the viewer to freely engage with the projection mechanism while simultaneously evoking the warehouses of gas5, the port and commercial district of Colombo.

The tables and lamps serve a dual purpose: they evoke the work of an architect and invite viewers to read the works as if they were large, illustrated books or geographical maps. Central to the exhibition are two objects: Saravita Box and Tank (Katuru Muvahath), which operate metaphorically on multiple levels. The Saravita Box is a typical contemporary urban object used by street food vendors, who personalize it with decorations, lights, and sounds to attract customers, transforming it into a performative object. The Tank (Katuru Muvahath), also a performative object, is a mobile knife sharpener that still roams the markets of Colombo offering to sharpen knives and blades. These two works represent both the consent towards power and the oppression of the people, drawing on Gramscian thought, which is very close to the artist. Inspired by the Prison Notebooks, the artist reflects on themes such as the alliance between workers and peasants, the relationship between intellectuals, class and party, the state as a combination of political society and civil society of domination and direction, and the development of a new philosophy of the proletariat.

A constellation of themes appears to originate from a critical issue that the artist brings to light through mythological characters reinterpreted in a contemporary context: why does the working class, even after Marx's elucidation, continue to accept exploitation? What prevents it from finally constituting itself as a revolutionary subject? How can the oppressors, the ruling class, gain the consent of the oppressed, the subalterns? These are questions that delve into the mechanisms of power, making Antonio Gramsci's analyses and categories an important reference in the study of colonial domination and decolonization processes. Thus, Prasad Hettiarachchi's thought is infused with Antonio Gramsci's framework, particularly in the dual context of relations with the state and with colonizers.



Therefore, power takes on new and complex forms, as in The Queen, a refined and elegant double portrait that overlays the face of an enigmatic Chinese Empress with that of Queen Elizabeth. Wrapped in a sumptuous cloak adorned with roses, thorns, and predatory birds, it is the perfect embodiment of the ambiguity and dual face of the new invasions. In the portraits of the series The Architect, which strongly allude to India, geographically close and historically linked to Sri Lanka by a visceral relationship fraught with tensions and contradictions, the figure of Gandhi seems to come alive in the bodies of the architects, new Gurus of a wild urban development. Leaning like ascetics against construction poles, their bodies and cloaks embroidered with an intricate and anarchic architectural pattern where ancient symbols - the swan, the lotus - now reduced to empty simulacra, navigate among highways, pipelines, wind turbines, and menacing cranes. Round sunglasses shield the eyes of the architects, concealing their predatory and probing gaze. Contrasting with the hidden gaze of the Architects are the doubled eyes of the protagonists in the series They come from North . From their heads emerge not sacks anymore, but transparent bubbles that are nothing more than photos of the Chinese construction sites that have invaded the island. The transparency of the material allows the magic of a cinema of shadows and free projections.

In the drawings dedicated to Slave Island, a historic working-class neighborhood increasingly victimized by aggressive gentrification, white dominates and configures an abstract landscape. Here, in a refined interplay of symbolic references and complex layers, traditional architectures float alongside menacing construction sites, unsettling creatures, and mutating bodies. In this context, white, traditionally associated with Buddhism and the concept of purity, undergoes a reversal of meaning, becoming the color that absorbs and conceals the violence of a corrupt and violent power that often resorts to murders, kidnappings, and cover-ups.

Amidst this absorbing white, appear like raptor's talons, hooks of imposing cranes grabbing mysterious sacks intertwined with the hair of the inhabitants. The Sack, a recurring central object throughout the artist's work, is a magical box containing memories, dreams, as well as objects and clothing of a people increasingly forced to abandon their homes due to environmental disasters, wars, or rampant gentrification. The artist does not reveal the contents of these sacks explicitly. In works like Our lives in the sack and Sack, they become sculptures made of papier-mâché, a material that inherently carries within it the chronicles of Sri Lanka through the pages of newspapers with which it is composed. However, Hettiarachchi paints their surfaces, drawing from the Jataka Tales, an immense collection of stories and fables from Buddhist mythology that have over the years been pillaged, censored, and manipulated by nationalist ideologies. Hettiarachchi revisits this universe in a contemporary and non-religious context, portraying mythological characters that are still very much alive in the popular imagination. For example, central to his narrative is the story of Patachara, a princess who, driven to madness by the loss of her family, finds Enlightenment through her encounter with the Buddha. This imaginary world provides refuge for inhabitants forced into isolation by rampant urbanization that has dissolved social ties.

The series Floating City narrates the dream of a new Colombo where alongside luxurious buildings, oases of well-being in a country gripped by inflation and corruption of a political caste entrenched in power, emerges the silhouette of Port City, a Chinese- built city on an artificial island made of sand dredged from the ocean. This new luxury is built with the labor of workers forced to work under conditions of economic precariousness and insecurity to construct palaces and oases of well-being.

The viewer is invited to traverse and move fluidly across multiple levels of seeing and hearing: exhibition, artistic installation, geographical exploration, musical performance, expanded cinema. Regardless of the mode of engagement, Hettiarachchi's vision, infused with an interpretation that is oriental and postcolonial of Marxist ideology and Gramscian thought, is simultaneously art, a political manifesto, and critical reflection.