15: Building a little Sri Lankan village

September 22, 2019

A natural material palette for today’s workshop

The next day, back at the class after the tour of Apè gama, we selected a collection of natural materials that were a miniature scale of what we had seen in real life:

Coconut husks,
Mud Clay,
Iratu (Ekel) sticks and
Wooden popsicle and Kebab sticks.
Base board - from our friends at Anim8.lk, we scavenged for leftover pieces of foam board (usually used to mount posters) to use as a base for each house.
Tip:Controlling the size of this base was crucial in order to avoid waste of clay, so we set it to roughly an A4 size.

A quick Memory challenge

To start, we asked the students to try to remember the buildings they saw yesterday. What were they called? What were they for? They had all certainly paid better attention than I did, as I found them explaining to me the details of buildings such as the potters house, ironmongers house, agricultural water gates etc..

As we asked them, wrote each of the building names on pieces of paper and handed it out to teams of two. Our hope was that at the end of this exercise, they would have built (in miniature) all the components of the entire village!

Preparing a demonstration model

My father had suggested he make an example of a Gami Gedara (village house) as an example of how each of the materials can be used. As an envirinmentalist, he stressed on the idea of emphasising why this was a ecological way of living. It turned out to be a fun father daughter exercise, and set a good standard to what could be achieved with natural materials.

Building a mini village!

The models that the students came up with were INCREDIBLE.

The details of the ‘wii bissa’ (paddy store) were amazing in that it was circular, raised off the ground and carefully ventilated with Iratu sticks. (I wish I took a picture of this!) One student made the island, complete with bridge in the middle of the agricultural water basin (an essential component of an agrarian village) that was often used as a mini shrine to pray for a good harvest. Then there was the Palpatha, set atop a tree branch.

Here’s more: .