Welcome to the South Asian Studies seminar, and I would like to introduce Dr India Pidio, who is going to be speaker for today.
Vidya is an anthropologist and actor who works at the intersection of conflict and visual culture,
and her current research looks at war photography and civilian resistance in northern Sri Lanka and
considers the local and global aftermath of civil conflict through the making and moving of images.
India is an associate lecturer in Social Anthropology at St Andrews, the University of St Andrews,
and she's also a founding member of the first of its kind virtual museum in Sri Lanka,
titled Museum of Religious Freedom, which is a space for archiving,
learning and critically reflecting on the complex histories and contemporary concerns relating to the freedom of belief or religion in Sri Lanka.
So today of India, we'll be talking about how the final years of the Sri Lankan Civil War were transformed
by a significant development in the techniques of photography and how digital
cameras and mobile phones in the hands of a public led to a surplus of digital
images documenting the horrors of Sri Lanka's no fly zone in the post-war period.
These photographs and footage can persist in active, online and offline circulations,
and this underpins competing political claims and demands for justice and accountability.
So centred on this, the public commemoration of the 2009 massacre the talk of India will give will examine
the unruly afterlives of atrocities photographs within the context of Tamil civilians,
resistance and remembrance in northern Sri Lanka. So before I hand over the night to world, so to speak of India,
just some housekeeping rules of India will talk for 40 to 45 minutes and then we will open for questions which Typekit directly into the chat.
India took over to you, India.
Thank you so much, Stephanie, for that introduction, including the surprise mention of the virtual museum, a religious freedom.
Anyway, I'm going to start talking and I do have some slides.
I'm not showing any graphic images, but I just want everyone to be aware that this is a discussion of atrocities,
so it might not exactly be pleasant descriptions of violence, et cetera.
So please consider yourself cautioned. I'm just going to start sharing my screen if that's OK.
OK, can you see that OK? Yes. Perfect.
Thank you. So I have this scripted out in order to keep two times, I'm going to be reading hopefully will be engaging,
but there are some pictures where we want to look at so atrocity nation state amnesia
the photographic debris of the Sri Lankan Civil War On the 18th of May 2018,
the road from Jaffna to Maldives was punctuated by small towns in mourning.
It was the ninth anniversary of the last day of war between the Sri Lankan state forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or the LTTE.
The intensification of hostilities between 2006 and 2008 fatally impacted the Rumney Tamil community,
who were caught between the military's indiscriminate offensives and the Tigers frantic last stand by January 2009.
Over 300000 displaced civilians were forced into government,
declared no fire zones and trapped between the advancing army and the retreating combatants.
Many thousands succumb to relentless state directed artillery shelling and aerial bombardment.
Essential humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, were curtailed, deepening the crisis.
Not even hospitals and medical facilities were saved from the armed forces systematic attacks.
Neither warring parties showed regard for international humanitarian law or civilian life.
As the rebels command structure collapsed. The able-bodied were draughted in desperation to fight for an independent Tamil homeland that day,
like many thousands before them, did not survive to see. The final days of the three decade long insurgency led by the Tamil militancy unfolded
in will back where it was brutally extinguished between September 2008 and May 2009.
An estimated 40 to seventy thousand civilians were killed in the money.
Government statistics maintained that the number was no greater than 9000.
Credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity have been levelled against both the Sri Lankan state forces and the LTTE.
A newlywed couple Remembrance Day upon which this papers focussed walruses were reanimated in makeshift monuments that mobilised photography,
little roadside shrines were centred around assemblages of photographs, small candles showing the carnage of the final months of the war.
Others house portraits of the known dead and missing, garlanded with peach, hibiscus, white pinwheels,
flowers and red Zora unscented commonplace funeral blooms for lives lost Cleo and lamps of mourning were shuttered.
Shops draped with black flags announced a region wide half of the town's marked with the protest.
A day of turmoil. Grief in the predominantly Sinhalese south remembering the end of the war took on an entirely different tone,
indicative of the lack of consensus about the nature of this atrocity.
Preparation to the annual commemoration of Victory Day, as it's called on the 19th of May well underway.
The photographic debris of war making of the transient memorials in the North challenge the proclamation of this hard-won peace.
The government's projection of reconciliation took on the form of new highways,
ports and stadiums in southern Sri Lanka and grand monuments in the north as a tribute to the bravery of the armed forces.
For those gathered at Mouly by such concrete,
accolades amounted to insulting the perpetrators who were responsible for the deaths and disappearances of their family and friends until 2015.
Public gatherings to remember the time awarded were prohibited, taking place in secrecy or hidden away in homes.
Commemoration of the war that remains contested as a surveillance,
intimidation and harassment of those meeting and to mourn in public by state intelligence continues where
the visual material remains of the Tamil militancy and its efforts at state building have been raised.
Tamil imaginaries of the nation and the imperatives of the Sri Lankan state persisted at troubled odds.
In these divergences, the causes and consequences of the war and the contours and histories of nation and state were quietly but resolutely opposed.
This paper delves into the visual debris of war in the form of atrocity photographs
and the unruly afterlives within the context of remembrance and resistance.
Karen Straw's uses a metaphor of refraction to examine how popular photography mediates between widely
shared representational forms and the visual logics and more intimate concerns as they change context.
Photographs accrue new social meanings and functions.
Sri Lanka's territorial boundary also served as a threshold between political suppression and possibility.
Defining the refractions of the images discussed here. Photographs and gendered silence or risk on the island, conversely,
allowed for vocalisations of pursuit for truth and accountability, or demands for nationalist liberation outside its borders.
While acknowledging the extensive visibility and impact of wartime images outside of Sri Lanka,
I focus on the uses of photography in the not in northern Sri Lanka, where freedoms were limited and the risks remain constant.
By sending the space of remembrance and movie Michael as a point of departure,
I explore the political work of photography in the shadow of the nationalist conflict.
Photography offers us a window onto contested questions of war, nation state and citizenship.
Everyday photography and the endless contextualisation and we materialisation of photographic images presented a compelling
means to illuminate the effects of war and the lingering political frictions and grievances of the post-war following.
I realised the provocation. This forms an attempt to watch the types of photographs that made up the post-war image world of my interlocutors.
My analysis extends beyond what is shown in the image to reconstruct the photographic event and its subsequent circulations,
and we framings to account for the inscriptions of time, an increasingly borderless movement as enabled by the digital and the virtual.
In another life, the senator near the ocean, Admiral Levi Cosmi,
had played host to a game of cricket and football, but it remained irrevocably steeped in the detritus of war.
The soil at Mouly Biche was still tangled and scattered with remnants and the no fire zone children's shoes, women's saris,
the plastic shells of battery-powered radios, men's rubber slippers, woven mats and blue tarpaulin all served as indexes of atrocity.
Hundreds of mourners had gathered before a crowd with metal rods that would be repurposed as torches.
Here, they took off their shoes towards digging into soil,
consecrated darkly by the relics of nation and violence, as if to form an elemental tether to all that was lost.
Examining the everyday materiality of violence in Sierra Leone, Marion Fermé considers how local histories are bound up in matter,
whereby through objects, language and social relations, violent historical memories, sentimental and critically appropriated.
The visible world, Vermeij argues, is activated by forces concealed beneath the surface of discourse, objects and social relations in Malawi.
Back what was buried, though only barely concealed, served as a material reliquary of nation upon which political continuities and claims are built.
Photographs of the soil tangled up with wartime residue were posted on mediums such as Instagram,
which captions demanding recognition for the atrocities against the community and justice demanding justice for victims.
Where ragged shirts, broken suitcases and small school school bags are half buried in the dirt.
Mourners assembled makeshift memorials for the departed loved ones.
Amongst these were those whose family members had disappeared in the hundreds following the surrender to the state at the end of the war.
Flowers and incense circle and circle photographs, elegant studio portraits and occasional families that stared headshots still laminated
into identity cards were placed on mounds of soil resembling little graves.
Many were elderly women, often alone, weeping with visceral grief that hung heavy in them.
A stone's throw away on the strip of beach were the final days of the war.
It unfolded scraps of sun and salt bleached family albums carried by victims had
survived for a number of years before they slowly deteriorated and washed away.
Flags banners printed with brightly tinted atrocities was strung on tree branches and tents that offered sweet cordial to the participants.
Despite a buzzing media draw, an upset a few elderly mothers reminding them of the harm of falling shells.
Local photographers, media workers, citizen journalists and activists congregated around grieving families looking
for the most arresting of potential photographic evacuations that would.
In the days that followed, the event circulated around the local and media.
Local media scape little children cried over parents they had only known for a few months of their short lives.
Grandmothers wept over their dead sons and daughters, who had not survived the teenage years or had disappeared upon surrender to the state.
A father boy in his arm, a large picture frame and causing multiple grave, says a family tree of death.
A mother mourned a Photoshop memorial portrait of her son. Two images flanking a text that spoke to his memory.
As the movie commemoration preceded a sharp cry cut through the hum of morning in the morning local time on May.
The truth is in the soil, a mother is about anxiety and both lament and curse.
She despairingly grabbed at the Earth with her hands. Photographers bunched around her.
Two women held up a post-war seta clutched clutching at the soil desperately as of the Earth, might open up and offer her answers.
Photography was central to the nation state and citizen making practises of Sri Lanka's competing state actors,
the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.
The media was mobilised within personal and collective political spheres to mediate both individual and shared political futures,
which sustained conflict and resulted in mass displacement and international migration.
These imaginings would become icons, become transnational and aspiration and character escaping into a space of global circulation.
These days, this served as an unlikely expansion of Azaylia's proposition of photography's capacity to be territorial lies in wartime and post-war.
In Sri Lanka, citizenship as a practical pursuit to remedy inequalities of political stackers was made possible by everyday photography.
Personal and political improvisations facilitated by photography played a crucial role in helping transcend the limits of the sovereign.
These enables, in turn, greater amplification of allocated claim for a time illusion state and homeland by way of a nation.
The territorial lies to transnational dispersal in northern Sri Lanka.
Popular photographic practises have been defined by war in terms of what was photographed,
why they were photographed and how these photographs were displayed, shared, concealed and destroyed.
Conflict continues to determine the afterlives of these images, emphasising how war affected communities are actively engaged in the production,
reproduction, embellishment and circulation of photographic images that pertain and respond to of their civic and political status.
Where conflict photography has been typically theorised through the lens of documentary images is compelling and necessary,
an important shift to understanding of what frontline photography can constitute and demonstrates the
medium's perceived power to confront common evasion and help materialise political aspirations and features.
This paper speaks principally to the diversity and vibrancy of those photographers and their interminable conjugations within a landscape of loss,
displacement, war, death and terror. The boundaries between the public and the intimate were blurred, and the social became inherently political.
Conflict necessitated the generation of new social,
political and institutionalised image making practises and their splendid transnational circulations.
As thousands of Tamils fled the island as the war escalated,
the internationalised social and political arcs and permutations of these images would become increasingly unruly.
Following the 2009 military victory by the state, the oppression of the Tamils under the guise of national security continues.
The diverse photography's of the post-war era began to reinforce new and competing post-war political claims and demands,
transitional justice grievances and individual aspirations.
But parity of citizenship photographer's capacity for contingency, as theorised by Walter Benjamin,
is vital to its political possibilities in the context of post-war Sri Lanka events of war, and the troops were numerous and disputed.
There exists also a powerful paradox the scarcity of personal photographs compounded by loss, displacement status,
access to cameras and the cost of studio services co-existed with an excess of images documenting wartime suffering.
The final phase of the Sri Lankan Civil War was marked by a significant transition in the techniques of photography.
In the mid 2000s, analogue practise became rapidly supplanted by compact digital cameras and mobile phone cameras.
Unrestrained by the finite exposures and temperamental qualities of film cameras.
Hundreds of images could be immediately generated, viewed, modified and transmitted.
A surplus of digital images recording the horrors and atrocities of the war zone captured by both victims and
perpetrators were a direct result of the shift where these events were framed and atomised by multiple perspectives,
lenses devises and image regimes.
Contingency understood as a future uncertainty demanding both personal and political intervention lends itself to grapple with photography,
social and political reflections. Within the social conditions and transformations of the Sri Lankan food,
sure new and responsive photography's were continually generated in both intimate and official spheres.
A large number waited tender to manage personal and political contingencies.
A surfeit of photographic debris, as if to visually enumerate the pervasive terrors of the state,
reinforce the collective imagining of Tamil nation state and its political necessity, as well as possibility.
Following Christopher Binny, the medium's capacity to disturb and trouble was enabled by both volume and ubiquity,
magnified by the digital reproduction, enhancement and circulation of photographs, rather than a singular.
The most spark of chance associated with the sort of iconic images produced by photojournalists, for example, that we associate with war photography.
Accent spaces of Tamil civilian resistance, as well as those declaring renewed claims of nation,
became saturated with images showing the devastation of war.
Such photographs drew attention to the countless injuries inflicted on Tamil bodies on the Tamil landscape.
These amounted to a visual inventory illustrating claims of genocide,
boldly paper on the contested homeland of digitally or through user generated maps on social media platforms.
It served as a communal act of evidencing where community histories and landscapes intertwined
with the chronology of state violence against Tamil citizens were continually expunged.
The assembly of photographs formed. In that meeting, mobilisations a defiant act of making visible in numbers the resilience of the nation.
Secondly, even within more intimate realms,
seemingly mundane portraits such as national identity photographs or the contents of wedding albums performed
an important function in aiding individual mobility that was ultimately bound to citizenship aspirations.
This image, for example, shows the use of a national identity card to commemorate were lost, and maybe I'll talk about it more in the Q&A.
So the small dirt road to the gardens of By was brimming with hundreds of grabbers.
The path was marked by flamboyant paper and vinyl pandas printed with photographs, maimed children, injured elderly,
the dismembered dead, hundreds fleeing for their lives with their worldly belongings borne on their backs and bicycles.
Others wounded and imitated, queuing for kanji courage.
Photographers, both civilian and militant trapped in, will turn their cameras on for their own suffering.
In Sri Lanka, the makers of these images, public images remain mostly anonymous.
Photographers in exile occasionally step forward to claim ownership as they began to relive their lives and asylum elsewhere.
Thousands of images circulated online as part of displays build for commemoration events,
such as the one that we see here in Sri Lanka, echoing a civic demand for recognition for the violence that took place in 2009.
These congregations of images often suggested that the Tamil community's impaired civic status to follow Abiola.
As always, racing can only be remedied by national self-determination.
The photographs displayed in Mouly by in and around the north and east during the time of the commemoration,
with those captured by both victims and perpetrators.
Celebratory records of annihilation were snapped on cell phones and digital cameras by their executioners in early years.
A portable digital image making Sri Lankan state soldiers exultant pauses, for example,
affirmed the heroism in what the Sri Lankan government described as an effort at eradicating terrorism.
These men documented their own experiences and making a war on the front lines.
Compatriots killed by their adversaries because of brutalised Tamil bodies to strip them desecrated enemy subjects of deliberate injury.
The callous executions of prisoners and army men posing triumphantly over piles of corpses recovered and recovered weapons holes.
Such photographs, especially those of dead tiger cadres,
bolstered the state's account of liberation and its assertion of a benevolent humanitarian rescue operation,
which is the sort of government tagline in this business.
Embedded media personnel staged scenes of combat and rescue with cinematic web Tamils are simultaneously
framed as both victims in need of saving and culprits requiring requiring total extermination.
The line between civilian and combatant had been blown by many decades of state violence, coupled with voluntary enlistment and forced recruitment.
As a result of the state's rhetoric of undoing and antagonism, the distinction was one that many in the south of Sri Lanka were willing to overlook.
Yet what was made apparent in the images produced during the final months of war was
the perpetrator state's wilful and catastrophic failure to protect its Tamil citizens.
This continued to permeate the post war, where Tamil lists and the expression of interlinked political grievances were
regularly condemned and recommended as efforts to resuscitate the Tamil militancy.
State violence against those who accost a suspect cast as suspects persisted.
Tamil photographer is trapped in the war zone, collectively drew attention to the plight of civilians in the fire zones,
while the Sri Lankans dead when the Tamil victims invisible through claims of zero civilian casualties, thus denying the vast losses that took place.
Soldiers photographed the brutalities that were deemed necessary to win the war.
The Tamil militants, in turn, enhanced civilian visibility through photography to protect its own interests.
Pictured captured by emergency aid workers, meanwhile, verified the government's bombings of hospitals and designated humanitarian centres.
Journalists and photographers working for the Tigers document the carnage with transmission to the outside world by waves of Tamil news via web sites.
These photographs, showing the catastrophe of the war zone supplemented the LTTE,
is repeated requests for a permanent ceasefire confronted by what was described
as an unprecedented humanitarian crisis weeks before the war finally ended.
I just want to flag that this remains contested, but is something to take note of the witness of the Tamil.
But what's important here is that the witness and testimony of Tamil survivors of the Bicol have also
often been silenced and denied or rejected on account of the city and perceived allegiance to the LTTE.
In the post war, these images and footage made with diverse intentions endured in online and offline circulations.
Such images simultaneously motivated contrasting readings and mobilisations.
Sinhalese nationalist celebrations. Tamil nationalist demands for separate dead evidence of war crimes.
And international calls for accountability, thus emphasising the unruliness and possibility implicit in Benjamin's suggestion.
A photographic contingency following the end of the war,
the visual material markers of the aspiring Tamil state were aggressively demolished on occasion,
such as movies such as Movie Remembrance Day,
atrocity photographs and momentarily stitched into the landscape and acts of commemoration and resistance.
The recasting of the northern landscape under the direction of the military heritage
development apparatus was described as a process of signalisation such violence.
Such violations are documented on the hashtags on photography centred social media platforms such as Instagram,
registering complaints against the state's colonial occupation.
This is the essential context, again, which one must grasp the political power of claims upon this landscape, as articulated through photography in.
Sorry. In a black banner displayed Jackman University in May 2018, four photographs showed the suffering of the final months of war.
A mother tended to a bawling when the child was broken on but was in a sling.
Strapped Tamil prisoners of war were rounded up near a sort of waterlogged mud bed.
One appeared to be alive but collapsed into the water, holding his head. Few soldiers watched on while another led a naked men to the pit.
The execution was imminent. Amongst them was also a young boy.
It may be readily inferred that this was one of the many jokey photographs captured by army personnel.
The third partial, the third, showed a pile of corpses half folded into the soil, perhaps prior to a hasty burial or cremation.
The boat exposed a camp with injured camels sprawled on the ground, where the building of new roads also seated.
Buddhist shrines and civilian lands remain occupied in an ever expanding military camp, housing the perpetrators of these violences.
These images of atrocity directed attention away from the hegemonic script of a victorious peace,
then said movie back necessitated then a different sort of remembrance imagery as a
mnemonic of nation taking the form of those who were essentially martyred on its behalf.
To borrow the language of my interlocutors in the midst of shelling gunfire and exalt time,
a photographer from Jaffna who will keep anonymous in this instance photographed the destruction of his community.
His family was amongst the thousands trapped in Mouly back in the brutal final months of war.
Camera in hand He painstakingly snapped the devastation of war.
He narrated his lost in a survivor with filmic vigour,
repeatedly making clear that his photography was not intended to serve the parties and the politics of the conflict,
but the evidential by the record the world needs to know about the suffering, he said simply.
He hoped that their contents would serve as evidence of what was done to his people through his photographs,
shot in colour and sometimes edited into black and white. The photographer sought to capture moments of stillness amidst chaos in a vivid Tamil image.
While that draws on Hindu and Catholic iconography and the flamboyance of South Indian Tamil cinema.
It was a contrasting solemnity of black and white, a colour typically associated with mourning that demanded the viewer's attention.
In his photographs, now circulated and exhibited globally, the war was captured in intense detail.
Huddles of young and old fled in chaotic processions, the belongings heaped onto the backs of bicycles and bullock carts.
Black clouds of smoke billowed on the horizon,
evidencing shelling that the Sri Lankan state denied a woman embracing a memorial portrait of a relative led a small convoy of exhausted escapees.
Dogs and a message factor followed ready at their heels, ready old men and women, deep knee deep in salt water stacking,
cooking pots, plastic chairs, tin kettles and old rice stacks full of uprooted possessions into small fishing.
Boats on the lagoon were all pictured in his photography.
Other photographs emphasise the seemingly endless tragedy of the one named SoundCloud.
Old men dug graves to bury the dead laid out on stretchers fashioned out of brush mats and ritual branches.
Families sheltered and slept under the abandoned husks of buses or queued for water dispensed from houses with plastic buckets.
A woman carried over 10 mat in the crook of her arm and a tiny pet monkey in a makeshift chicken wire cage on her back.
A stunned boy in a bright orange shirt sat on the back of a tractor, cradling a baby in his arms.
Sleeping or dead? It was impossible to say. The dagger saw two men on a hero on the bike gasped in horror at an event unfolding beyond the frame.
Sandwiched between them was the half concealed body of a girl in a blue teddy bear print dress.
The jagged bones and jutted out made it difficult to gauge whether there was more to her than a pair of legs spilling out of the side.
A woman carrying a boy in a Red Bunny cap looked on at the two and a half passengers in resignation amid this turmoil.
There were also shy, smiling toddlers sitting on saris, wings draped in every bunch draped on TV bunches and tired grandmothers cradling happy babies.
Life to person persevered.
Amidst that, I wanted to capture the feelings of people through their faces, and so I photographed them directly looking at the camera.
No words I required them, the photographer mused. Nearly a decade after the war had ended.
I don't support any side, but I see this as my responsibility to make sure that the injustices,
the crimes committed against the Tamil people are brought to light. I see these photographs as evidence of genocide.
I do not know whether we will get justice, but it is my look and meaning purpose.
These photographs must be seen and these injustices need to be enquired into internationally, but no one is speaking on behalf of US Tamils.
This is socks. You are direct with us. This needs there needs to be justice.
And no one can denied what happened. We must record this for history.
The photographer's images were amongst thousands claimed an unclaimed, mobilised, concealed,
appropriated exhibitor and disputed that persevered in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan armed conflict.
Speaking to a history of loss that had been silenced in Sri Lanka as the material remains of war were covered up,
the photographic debris continued to challenge the absence as contrived by the state.
This photographer was not alone in his pursuit of photography as possible,
a record the significance of the record was not merely in its sole in its role as a source of historical truth.
In its photographic incarnation, it was also politically expedient to be read for its intentions, contingencies and disturbances.
The photographic panorama was a repository of the past that not only pointed to the future in its present mobilisations,
but demanded a future alternative that tethered to a political claim of nation in the money.
A studio photographer who I will also keep anonymous, had occasionally moonlighted as a photographer for the militancy.
He recalled the mass confiscation of cameras by the latter during the final months of war.
Cornered, the tigers were using photographs from the war zone to document atrocities by the state and strengthen the
expanding appeal for an internationally mediated ceasefire that they requested at the time as the war was ending.
Photographs uploaded onto news websites spurred the dispersed global Tamil diaspora in Europe,
North America and Australia to undertake global protest, drawing attention to the plight of civilians trapped in the fly zones.
And indeed, we see these photographs continuing to be mobilised within these spaces of desperate protests,
which are centred on demands for accountability and justice for the victims of the Sri Lankan war.
So this studio photographer buried his camera in the silent movie by hoping that he might recover it one day.
He had not returned to look for them, but was certain that he would not be able to look at it now,
where people who went to Cullen came back to pondered, implying something of his resilience in the face of adversity as much as his communities.
Photographs produced by victims or those living in.
I use the term victim here in quotation marks or those living in sites of active conflict or crisis in the recent years,
such as in Syria and Myanmar, are yet to be afforded significant attention within the ideological literature on photography and conflict.
Those, like the first photographer will collide amid war saw themselves as exercising something like Oslo's called responsibility.
This was also central ultimately to that and the political identity for the Tamil community.
Confronted by the Sri Lankan state, the atrocity image demanded to be amplified as perhaps inadvertently implied by Kleinman and Kleinman.
The local population is often tacitly categorised and homogenised as passive victimised subjects of such photographs.
If we think back to claims by Susan Sontag, for example,
they are seen as being seen and theorised as somehow separate from the global audience to which they do not appear to belong as produces audiences,
consumers or intermediaries in their dissemination and circulation.
Within this framing that also rendered apolitical and lacking in agency,
often relegated within tropes of the suffering other as opposed to makers, movers and manipulators of images.
This premise has rendered progressively unwarranted by the rapidly expanding access to image making devices their potentials in appropriations,
but enhanced with internet based platforms available for the direct dissemination of images.
It must be noted that within the context of the Sri Lankan conflict,
atrocity images have had a very complex history of political use by the state as well as the LTTE.
Visuals of war and violence were actively incorporated into the Tamil image world through photography,
film and other forms of public art utilised as a tool for recruitment and the political socialisation of the Tamil community.
The true tigers, or cadres trained in film and photography for the LTTE, is now endorsing a more reality television media unit,
filmed its battles against the Sri Lankan armed forces on land and sea.
Central to this distribution were images for Gandhi, the Sri Lankan state's atrocities against and victimisation of the Tamil community.
That, in turn sort of strengthened their claim for a sovereign homeland.
These were featured in exhibitions and pamphlets circulated online and broadcast
on television to enlist popular support and encourage recruitment locally.
These visuals were also circulated internationally to secure support and financial contributions from the Tamil community abroad.
The footage was used by the group's military strategists to assess performance and as instructional material.
Moreover, the Tigers. She's over the Sri Lankan forces in various battles were documented, often in the form of Kill's,
showing the bodies of dead soldiers to rouse nationalist sentiment and public motivations of the Tamil political cause.
The Sri Lankan state initially claimed to avoid using atrocity images in its official media campaigns.
Now this is not to in with reference to its campaign against the JVP insurrection in the late 80s,
and I can speak about this more later, but I'm not going to touch on it now.
So, however,
the intensification of the war between 2006 and 2009 saw its adoption of similar visual strategies similar to that utilised by that term emergency.
This coincided with the switch from analogue to digital image making, as I mentioned before, as well as growing access to personal cameras.
Consequently, the war effort was enthusiastically documented by Sri Lankan soldiers.
The performative martial virtues of young troops is no for the Mount terms.
It is forced into military service from the rural Sinhalese South by poverty and unemployment.
Image animated the war for the screens of sceneries audiences.
This imagery was regularly revived in election campaign visuals ranging from posters and billboards to music videos to
remind voters of the Sri Lankan armed forces triumph over terrorism and the sort of agency of relevant political figures.
In this respect. Images of violation and violence underpinned the nationalist political claims in which atrocities were not denounced,
but demanded and celebrated photographs became generative of further future violence.
Claims of nations served as a means of consolidating the martial imperatives and powers of the state,
which also made visible the consequences to those who did not conform to a short lived,
informal economy of authentic and counterfeit visuals from the final years of the war emerged to satiate the sort of morbid public curiosity,
as well as political assertions both in Sri Lanka and overseas in the island's capital, Colombo.
VIDEO CDs of bloodshed and conquest sold for a couple of hundred rupee, so about a pound.
The content rejoiced in the grisly death of the Tiger leader and his acolytes at the Michael Sidis hawked in
Colombo included news footage captured from broadcast and handout footage from the Military Ministry of Defence.
Film and stills were captured on low grade phones and compact cameras,
as well as professional equipment that were leaked for profit a few months after the end of the war.
The Sri Lankan army also hosted a grand exhibition that sought to bring,
and I'm quoting here bring the heroism witnessed in the to on the television screen to the capital in Colombo.
The event was described as a beautiful live experience, and it drew thousands of citizens to experience the war.
And again, I'm quoting here the marvellous triumph for themselves through a display of captured weapons,
armoured fighting vehicles, soldiers demonstrating their combat skills and most significantly, photographs.
The images on display showed the visceral bodily destruction of the Tamil militants by the line up of corpses of dead cadres,
over which the triumphant military leadership stood internationally.
Tamil victims and international aid workers. Images and testimony soldiers trophy footage and photographs became the subject of
investigative documentary such as Sri Lanka's Killing Fields came out in 2011.
Similarly, Tamil photographers images of suffering were transformed into the contents of international exhibitions and publications.
While the films moved international audiences to outrage and advocacy in Sri Lanka,
they became the focus of state sponsored protests against the international community.
Widely publicised efforts were made by the government to discredit claims of
authenticity through the production of its own documentaries and publications.
These visuals remained coloured by the politicised tensions between ethnic groups.
Wartime atrocities committed on the basis of ethnic difference and a fundamental rejection of the notion of a shared
humanity and citizenship continue to be dismissed by the government and the majority of the island's population.
The political work of these atrocity images of buried origin and intent far exceeded the island.
Azoulay considers citizenship through the study of photographic practises,
suggesting that the media move towards new means for the photograph, the photographer and the spectator,
the untether themselves when the bonds of sovereign power or contracts of the nation state and economy,
drawing on the context of Israel and Palestine, where the Israeli state governs both citizens and Palestinian non-citizens.
As she phrases it together, even though they form a government differently as alien processes that the nation state retired realises citizenship.
This provides, she says, a protective shield to those declared as citizens within a certain territory and discriminates between
them and others non-citizens who are governed with them in the same territory by the same power.
By contrast,
Azoulay argues that photography the territory lies a citizenship reaching beyond its conventional boundaries and plotting or carving out a
political space in which the plurality of speech and action is actualised permanently by the eventual participation all of those who are governed.
This premise, Azoulay suggests, permits for civil skills that are not subject to nationality,
but rather borderless citizenship that demands an ethical responsibility towards one another.
These territorial circuits and proliferations of these images respond to asylees
appeal for civic spectatorship images from the final days of the Sri Lankan war.
Reinforced Witness Accounts Testimony,
an international advocacy efforts that underscored state violations of international humanitarian law shared on Instagram and Facebook,
compiled into YouTube clips or Flickr albums printed onto vinyl banners at commemoration events and protests.
They persisted within political within political claims of the post-war Tamils, both located in and dispersed from the island,
sought to imagine that their shared political future for a possible independent nation in these divergent,
even contradictory post-war registers,
wartime images accrued new political meanings and mediated new political potentials for different audiences for the Tamil community.
This signalled the hostility of the state both past and present.
Underpinning the necessity for an alternative political future within global frameworks for human rights and
world peace were Oslo's notion of solidarity and responsibility emboldens advocacy and accountability networks.
These photographs supplemented demands by international governments, governance commitments and action.
The inclusion of these visuals within quote unquote Western documentaries elicited outrage amongst.
Certain sections of Sri Lankan society where it was deemed as a sort of conspiracy
bolstered by against the Sri Lankan state and to undermine its sovereignty.
These visuals confirm the defeat of the quote unquote other that was a threat to the survival of the Sinhalese body and nation in this respect.
Such photographs also served as a reminder that individual politicians and military commanders
roles in vanquishing this perceived enemy becoming integral to their electoral influence.
Elsewhere, these mementos of atrocity were transformed into visual accompaniments to songs of patriotism and lamentations by Tamils,
including the LTTE important legacy of political and cultural production centred on atrocity and violence of the Sri Lankan state.
So these contending images regimes of war endured as Tamils sought to imagine their personal and political futures in the post-war,
burdened by the grounds and effects of extraordinary violence that begot this quote unquote peace, where the Sri Lankan state,
which stands as the perpetrator, the reorienting of its visual material mark of citizenship, as we saw in the example of the identity card,
isn't in an explicitly Tamil space of memory and resistance announces a space of intense conversion through acts of state terror and violence.
Lives and deaths of the Tamil community was subject to literally erasure, as evidenced by the materiality and visibility of Tamil culture.
Polity and history were also rendered invisible, if not actively destroyed.
The repurposing of identity photography in this instance and its incorporation index of resistance and national
articulation against the state served as a powerful and poignant application of political absence of disparity here.
This, again, in turn, is amplified by the digital, where there is space for great amplification,
extending and consolidating the nation beyond the territorial limits of the state through a dispersed community, as well as a network of hashtags.
In his study of transnational Tamil marriages, Siddharth and Monica examines how multiple involuntary displacements and voluntary migrations
have formed the locally and globally dispersed Tamil social and economic political media.
The significance of anticipation, as has been discussed by the Jagannathan,
as well as Mahanagar know of the significance of anticipation that Tamils have with regards to movement, violence and social mobility.
And it's also interesting in terms of understanding these social practises of photography and what it evokes in terms of the political.
The multitude of nation states, submarines and the competing registers of atrocity point to a fragmented world that contrast with the space,
but with an azoulay calls for a spectator to take part where aspirations of nation and state were both conflicted and multiple.
The categories of the governed and the oppressed were also problematic is in such a context.
Photography, even or especially in its democratic guise, became a medium through which political claims,
as well as politically generated violence, realising acts of nation state and citizen making were stimulated and sustained.
Photography's capacity for producing and rationalising violence, especially with the nationalist claims the word play was also dramatised.
Photographic practises have been shaped by interpreted, contradicted and have contributed to conflicting claims of citizenship.
A nation in Sri Lanka mapped against war centred on a demand for political self-determination and building of a nation state.
Photography and religious practises offer new insights into the lived experiences of conflict and the
articulations of personal and political futures in the sort of vexed space of the Sri Lankan post-war.
The visual also serves as a lens through which to examine what being Tamil as a project of future becoming might entail.
Here, photography serves as a dynamic means for making, visible, claiming, demanding and imagining in the wake of war and enduring oppression.
The medium reveals, importantly, its role in the disruptive formation of the borderless Tamil political sociality and
solidarity that have in turn strengthened its sort of located claims of the homeland.
Thank you.