Because places are always more than their postcards

You’ve all seen this; the story of a place getting limited to its postcard version until everything outside the postcard frame gets overlooked, forgotten and finally rejected as not of that place. Where we practice in Sri Lanka, this postcardification of places happens quite often in tourist towns that slowly lose the layers of their identity and become flattened.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast, which repeatedly enters ‘world’s best places to visit’ lists, is one of those. Its stories are saturated with images of beaches and coconut palms, surfboards, people silhouetted against sunsets dissolving into the sea.

Yes, there’s a reason why tropes exist. The palms, surfboards and sunsets are all true often enough. Tropes can be useful too; we don’t discard them entirely because they cater to expectations and sometimes even help make a business more approachable and familiar. But our role as commercial creators is not just to manage expectations; it’s also to create culture. Limiting the stories of a place to only its tropes reduces and flattens it, leaving out microcultures and environments that colour its reality much richer than its postcards.

A few years ago, we stumbled on a fragment of a South Coast story in a vintage devotional print from India. It depicts a scene from the Hindu epic Ramayana that’s interestingly concurrent with Sri Lankan mythology; Hanuman, the monkey god, crosses into Lanka carrying a part of the Himalayas mountain containing a life-saving medicine for his fallen warrior friend. Sri Lankan folklore says Himalayan fragments fell along the journey, forming several places across the island; most famously, Rumassala hill in the South Coast of the island, in Unawatuna. Even the etymology of the name ‘Unawatuna’ points to the Sinhala words ‘Onna-watuna’ (there it fell). The hillock’s unusual flora and long association with medicinal plants continue to keep the story alive, somewhere between mythology and possibility.

We wanted to bring this print into contact with circles that visit the south coast of Sri Lanka. Being a richly coloured chromolithograph, its visual language stands out distinctly against the homogenized, elegantly muted ‘coastal fantasy’ aesthetics of Sri Lanka’s southern seaside belt. This is precisely why we were drawn to it. It introduces a layer of cultural curiosity to a flattened representation of Southern Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s South Coast carries layered histories shaped by trade, migration, mythology, religion, language, and centuries of cultural exchange. Those stories deserve visual space too. Places are rarely as singular as tourism imagery makes them seem. Do we think Hanuman alone symbolizes Unawatuna? No. But we do think it adds a layer to the symbols, stories, and visual references that form part of a richer and more truthful identity for Sri Lanka’s South Coast.

This is how we test stories

This print is essentially a hypothesis of a story we believe has earned its place in the cultural landscape of a destination. We publish and sell stories like this through our store, and the commercial side of that matters: it gives us useful information on which stories resonate and which ones don’t find their audience. They tell us what people choose to take home, to frame, to give as gifts; that’s a form of cultural response that no focus group can replicate, and this is what we use to help our studio clients make products, spaces and experiences that actually work.

This is where our publishing work and our studio work inform one another. The objects, prints and booklets we put into the world are always tests of culture-making. They let us watch how a story travels, whether it lands with the traveller who knows the mythology, or the one who’s simply drawn to the image before understanding why. Whether it finds the diaspora or the curious outsider first. What questions it raises in the room it ends up in.

That intelligence shapes how we work with clients in travel and retail; brands building experiences around place. The risk we see most often in that work is the same risk the postcard represents: a compression of culture into its most frictionless version. Easier to sell, maybe. But harder to remember, and ultimately less true.

We’re also curious about something else: what does it feel like to encounter an image from your own culture, recognized and held with significance somewhere else? As more Indian travellers arrive in Sri Lanka, some specifically along the Ramayana trail, that question feels increasingly relevant. We’ll have an answer after a few seasons of testing this story out. That testing, in a way, is the point.

We’re drawn to stories that complicate a place slightly, that give people something to turn over in their minds. We don’t set out to create complexity for its own sake, but we welcome truthful layers that make a destination understood through people, beliefs, nature, ideas, and history rather than a Pinterest board. The ‘Hanuman in Lanka’ print is a small test of that idea. Hanuman in Lanka is now available in our store, as a cotton-mix, direct-to-film printed T-shirt. And we’re watching to see what it teaches us. We’ll tell you more when we find out.