Seema Mattu - podCASTE Episode 2: troublemakers in trinidad 🇹🇹
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.
Seema Mattu - podCASTE Episode 2: troublemakers in trinidad 🇹🇹
Guest speaker: Helen Starr (she/her)
With an undercurrent of friendship captured throughout the episode’s joy and laughter, Helen and Seema sit in community with one another and discuss: how caste in Trindidad came not to be, attitudes toward bodily fluids in municipal work, touch and hapticality, how we can hold each other through caste and by a Global South lens - and the ties between all of this and SEEMAWORLD. Can we get to the beat?
Content Warning: This podCASTE episode contains strong language around the 38-minute mark
Resources for the episode (as mentioned in the episode):
Fantasy in the Hold, by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: HAPTICALITY, OR LOVE
The metamorphosis of caste among Trinidad Hindus by N. Jayaram
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur
About Helen Starr
Helen Starr is an Afro-Carib Trinidadian world-building curator, commissioner, cultural activist and founder of The Mechatronic Library (2010). Her innovative practice establishes a Carib epistemology for digital art focusing on immersive media and AI technologies that express Indigenous concepts such as gender fluidity, skin-thinking, simultaneous multiple realities and nature godded worlds.
Working mainly with artists who have protected characteristics, Helen Starr has commissioned artworks from artists including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Seema Mattu, Aliyah Hussain, Rebecca Allen, Phoebe Collings James, Kinnari Saraiya and Anna Bunting-Branch, who have gone on to exhibit in museums across the globe.
Helen Starr has curated and produced artworks shown at many exhibitions both nationally (FACT, Liverpool, Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, QUAD in Derby and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead) and internationally. As board member she was part of the launch of Format Festival’s Mass Isolation Project (2020-23) where image makers from around the world were invited to document the Coronavirus pandemic via Instagram. With over 40,000 submissions from 90 countries it became the largest visual archive of the pandemic.
She has published several essays on the duality of Afro-indigeneity, was digital consultant on the Ab Rogers Design team (Wolfson Economic Prize 2021) and has served on the Jury for Ars Electronica Animation Festival in Linz Austria. Starr lives in London with her family and is devoted to the writings of the Jamaican philosopher Sylver Wynter.