Carceral Forms, Peripheral Zones

In our months of conversation, artist Tarik Ahlip and I kept returning to the idea of imprisonment. In Sri Lanka, where I write from, Bogambara, a maximum-security prison established in 1876 by the British administration, was closed in 2014, with the explicit aim of developing it into a “Cultural Park”. In February 2026, I visited the prison with the hopes of seeing it in its original reputation of stone walls of colonial architecture—it was also recommended to the public as a site of “sightseeing”.