Seema Mattu - podCASTE Episode 1: girmit histories with izland kuli 🇫🇯
During her year-long residency with Wysing Arts Centre, Seema developed podCASTE—a podcast series where each episode focusses on caste within a particular area of the world. Specifically, podCASTE opens up discussions which go beyond the notorious South Asian caste system. The lo-fi audio you’re about to hear places you firmly on Earth. This is to say that podCASTE in fact falls outside of the fictional narrative of Youterus and under a newer strand of SEEMAWORLD: da~LIT. da~LIT takes the worldly non-fictional view of a researcher, a fan labourer and an external examiner of intertwining themes around: caste, queerness, race and gender.
podCASTE episodes are presented online on Wysing Broadcasts and as part of Seema’s exhibition, The Scrawny Beauties of Ethni City, at QUAD Derby, installed in bus shelters. Every fortnight, a new shelter opens up another episode in the exhibition and a new episode will appear on Wysing Broadcasts.
Leading up to the exhibition’s launch, there were controlled environments in which visitors were able to interact physically with the bus-stop-like space as they might in real life. As a result, visitors who encounter the shelters, as more become available over time, portal between the show’s main setting in the fictional place of Ethni City and real-life responses to caste-centric lived experiences which inform the fictive storytelling that surrounds them.
Episode 1: girmit histories with izland kuli 🇫🇯
Guest speaker: Esha Pillay (she/her)
Taking inspiration from her feature in Tamil Futures 2020, Esha Pillay presents her vision for a Tamil future as a low-caste coolie from Fiji - encouraging viewers to further their understanding of gendered and caste-based violence(s) of indentured labour, and their intersections with intergenerational traumas.
Resources for the episode (as mentioned in the episode):
Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein & Dr. Lisa Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments
Lainy Malkani, Sugar, Sugar: Bitter-Sweet Tales of Indian Migrant Workers
Dr. Margaret Mishra, Between Women: Indenture, Morality and Health
Biography
Seema Mattu is a Valmiki world-building trickster, whose multi-channel practice is framed as a theme park—known as SEEMAWORLD. Through the playfulness of intersecting amenities and services, visitors are prompted to portal around a unifying setting weaved by Seema’s own multi-minority personhood.
With an interest in lo-fi high fantasy storytelling, SEEMAWORLD fuses both CGI and IRL environment-building, character creation, mixed-media animation, sound design and visual spectacle to explore: systems of caste, South Asian GL (girl(s) love), queer sorcery, fan labour and classifications of gender via digital technologies.
Recent projects include work with: Berwick Film and Media Festival, IKON gallery, Eastside Projects, New Art City, Blindspot Gallery and QUAD. In April 2022, she completed both Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship and a year-long residency with Wysing Arts Centre in March 2023. In December 2021, Seema became a QUAD International Digital Fellow, leading to her first major solo show in Autumn 2023.
Esha Pillay is an Indo-Fijian writer based in the U.S. whose research looks into intergenerational traumas among Indo-Fijian communities who are descendants of indentured labour and Girmit. She has a focus on caste violence throughout Girmit and in the present and challenges the "post-caste" narrative among descendants of indenture. Her own family stories and lived experiences guide her activism and story-telling across various digital platforms. Esha used to host a dedicated Instagram account, coolie_returns, to share further marginalized histories within larger indentured labour histories across different countries, islands, and diasporas. Her educational posts are now accessible on her website (izlandkuli.wixsite.com/cooliereturns), and you can find her other writing and projects at linktr.ee/izland_kuli.