Opens 6:30 PM
Discussion Begins 7:00 PM
Contact +1 868 394 4449
Description
This panel discussion and exhibition will explore the Soumayree, a traditional Indian Carnival masquerade character, through contemporary interpretations that engage with themes of spirituality, transformation, and cultural expression. The event will feature perspectives from Robert Young, Sade Budhlall and Kamille Andrews, who will discuss the evolving role of mas in cultural identity and resistance.
The discussion will examine Carnival as a dynamic space for artistic expression, spirituality, and social commentary. Artists will share their influences, creative processes, and interdisciplinary approaches to mas-making, highlighting how historical and social conditions shape contemporary portrayals. The conversation will explore themes of transformation, collective memory, and the intersections of tradition and reinvention.
Accompanying the discussion, an exhibition will showcase costume elements, performance documentation, and artistic process materials, offering attendees both visual and conceptual insights into the panelists’ work. This event will highlight how mas-making weaves together multiple histories while fostering inclusivity and ethical co-creation. By centering creativity as a tool for social change, the talk will emphasize the role of artists in shaping meaningful and transformative cultural practices.
This panel and exhibition at Kazillion Kollectiv Art Lab in Chaguanas will offer a space for deep reflection on the evolution of mas as an artistic and cultural practice and the potential of shared studio spaces in fostering collaborative creativity.
Discussion Themes
● Tradition & Contemporary Relevance: How can historical mas characters be reworked to reflect today’s social and political climate?
● Reimagining the Soumayree: What does it mean to reinterpret a historical mas character today?
● Embodiment & Identity: How do these portrayals navigate personal and collective storytelling?
● Mas as Socially Engaged Performance: How can performance art and Carnival traditions reflect themes of war, conflict, grief, and transformation?
● Future Directions: How can mas-making evolve to foster community, activism, and cultural sustainability?
Sade Budhlall
Soumayree - The March Home
A mas invoking Mother Durga and the Palestinian struggle, pre-envisioning a return to ancestral land. This portrayal explores resilience, divine protection, and the intersection of diasporic resistance movements.
Kamille Andrews
Soumayree - Iron Woman
An exploration of destruction and creation through the steelpan and dhantal, symbolizing grief’s transformation into strength. This portrayal engages with themes of destruction, creation, and transformation through metal, rhythm, and ritual, drawing connections to the deities Shiva and Ogun.
Robert Young
Robert Young is an artist and designer from the Caribbean island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Founding The Cloth, a lifestyle and fashion design company, in 1986, Robert has used clothing as his medium, capturing social landscapes and emotions drawn from his immersive Afro-Caribbean upbringing, and working in communities to dress and empower the troupes and personalities that make it their life’s work to represent us.
Robert’s practice is rooted in the working class and Caribbean memory, reaching back to historical places of resistance and attempting to transmute that energy into the consciousness of the now. He applies the same principles to his practice as a designer and bandleader in the annual Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Robert is long-known for his band, A Vulgar Fraction, conceptualising and designing yearly roving performance art which finds the light on the streets of Port-of-Spain during the Carnival ritual. Robert's process is pedagogical, encouraging performers to engage with and connect to the underbed of ideas through working with their hands and making the mas, reclaiming creativity as a central part of what it means to exist as their present self. Robert provides the framework, foundation, guidance and material for the costumes, with the encouragement and agency to have the costumes be built from the vantage point of each participant's personal relating, making the mas, the art, the wearer’s very own. His practice is also interrogative and each year, through panel discussions and active outreach, he brings together experts, elders and the wider community to dig more deeply into the thematic grounding of that year’s band.
Robert is the grandson of Thomas Young, who worked to unionize workers in New York in the 1930s and 40s. Joe Young, Robert’s father, founded a trade union in Trinidad in 1961 and led bus strikes that directly influenced the course of the 1970 February Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. Robert’s mother, Grace, founded a credit union. Given these factors it is unsurprising that, in his self-taught art and design practice, Robert has always paid attention to how slavery, indentureship and colonisation continue to impact our lives and our environment. He investigates ways in which one can work under, over, around and through the side effects of these centuries-long injustices in the interest of reuniting shards and healing fractures of the self, which in turn, may impact, strengthen and reclaim community life for the better.
The Cloth is established in the Caribbean fashion and design community and is regularly featured in regional fashion events. The brand’s disruptive, bold and distinctive garments have been worn by heads of state and cultural icons. Recently, The Cloth represented the Caribbean region at CANEX Presents Africa at Tranoï S/S 24 in Paris Fashion Week, and staged runways shows at Portugal Fashion and the Intra African Trade Fair in Cairo through the AfreximbankCreative Africa Nexus. Robert was a speaker at the 3rd Afreximbank AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum, at the 31st Annual Meetings [sic] of the African Export-Import Bank in Nassau, in June, 2024. Since his work first appeared at the Biennial of the Caribbean in Santo Domingo in 1992, Robert’s art has continued to influence design in the African Diaspora. He collaborated with artist Ayana V Jackson for her exhibition From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexia with Ayana V Jackson, shown at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 2023.