We Are From Here

Out of the classroom and into the heart of the community! Learning on the move with the IVS squad. @ivs.fineart Phot credits: Arsalan 01.02.2026

A walk through stories, streets, and memories — Slave Island through the lens of the WEAREFROMHERE Project. Grateful to share this space and its voices with a group of postgraduate students from across universities.

Great to do a walk with students from @tamaartuniversity , swapping perspectives on history, architecture, and the incredible multicultural heartbeat of Colombo. What a day for cultural exchange! 31.10.2025

In this session, we explore the aural and material records of Colombo as a socially diverse, post-war coastal metropolis with rapid development that has been politically motivated and that includes elite colonial nostalgia and disenfranchisement of working-class communities. It is also a city that has experienced recent revolutionary uprisings. In this space, we focus on prompts to remember, to ground ourselves in spatial memory, by immersing ourselves in: - A neighborhood archive developed by the Ashray Project during the 2022 edition of Colomboscope, led by Firi Rahman (@ifiri ) of We Are From Here (@wearefromhereproject ). - Pamudu Tennakoon’s (@pamalamadu ) research, which looks into particular built and living architectures as well as contemporary cultural practice to engage city mnemonics—un-building and re-building of urban fabric. We then invite the audience to map their rituals and personalized homage to specific areas, seasons or moments of festivity, delicacies, and situated memory of neighborhood locales in the city. There Was Something Here Before was created by Zahira Asmal (@urbanwonder ) and produced by The City (@thecityagency ), with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka. Ceremonies in Everyday Urbanity Sunday, 27 July 2025 (5.30 pm onwards) Arcade Clock Tower Building First Floor, No 7 Independence Square Colombo 07 Images: We Are From Here Ashray, 2020-21 Sound recordings, drawings, maps, photographs and objects Installation view at Colomboscope 2022, Language is Migrant Supported by EUNIC (@eunicglobal ) Photography: Shehan Obeysekera Image Courtesy of Colomboscope #colomboscope @foldmedia @natasha_ginwala

14.08.2024

Murals are faded away, but the story remains. Picture @amaprera

with @studiokayamai 06.08.2024

Removed a heritage building to cause another inconvenience 🫱🏽‍🫲🏾 19.07.2024

Now and then

Today’s talk will cover what we do behind the scenes. Recent changes in Slave Island and about our informal archives. @chdm.lk 04.06.2024

@chdm.lk Repost :‘WE ARE FROM HERE’ is an art collective preserving and collecting community memory from Slave Island. In their own words, the material collected provides “snapshots of community histories: a letterhead of a papare band business, a scan of a curfew pass on August 12, 1953, an April 1954 seating card for a review of the armed forces to mark the visit of Queen Elizabeth Il and the Duke of Edinburgh offer vignettes of buried personal and community history...” CHDM’s first #AW2024 discussion kicks off with Firi Rahman, artist and founder of ‘WE ARE FROM HERE’, in conversation with Johann Peiris, Manager of the Access to Futures of Critical Learning (AFCL) Programme. Firi and Johann will reflect on the start of ‘WE ARE FROM HERE, the approaches to collecting community histories, the kinds of material that are evidence of the lives of communities in Slave Island, and the future directions of the project. LANGUAGE: English SPEAKER Firi Rahman’s (b. 1990, Sri Lanka) work is often concerned with the contentious relationship between humankind and the animal kingdom. He is particularly interested in the interactions between animals and urban environments, and the responsibility societies share in protecting biodiversity. His works, brought to life through his sombre and monochromatic style, are an intimate and sensitive engagement with wildlife. Even in their minimalism, the dexterity of his skill and close engagement with the subject imbues it with a palpable quality — compelling an empathetic response from the viewer. MODERATOR Johann Peiris is a sociologist and researcher who has worked with GIZ for the Facilitating Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation (FLICT) project and then with the Memory Culture Unit of SRP until 2022, where he served as an advisor for historical dialogue. Equipped with 8 years of experience in coordinating, managing and overseeing history-related programmes and initiatives, he hopes to continue being actively engaged in platforms that allow deeper critical dialogue on history and memory. CHDM’s #AW2024 events are made possible by generous donations from citizens interested in advancing memory-information work in Sri Lanka.

Back to the street for some updates from RDA 14.02.2024