HETAIN PATEL: A Podcast by SPILL Festival

A podcast series by SPILL Festival

Welcome to our second podcast series featuring conversations with artists and makers of all kinds that SPILL has presented, worked with or admired from a distance.

For this brand-new episode, I am talking to Hetain Patel, artist and filmmaker, although these designations barely scratch the surface of what he does. I caught up with Hetain in his London studio, not long after seeing him perform his beautiful solo dance piece Mathroo Basha at the Barbican. This performance was a meditation on ritual and language centred on his family’s working-class British-Gujarati experience.

In our conversation, this performance became a jumping off point for a wider discussion on the experience of identity as too often being something that is ‘done to you’, and how artmaking can help us have agency in terms of how we are perceived. I felt a lot of affinities with Hetain’s thinking on this subject. I was also really struck at the way he was able to make similar connections around questions of agency when he spoke about his project Come As You Really Are, where he worked with various hobbyists all over the UK for whom identity was often tied to some quite esoteric rituals of making and collecting.

- Robin Deacon

Credits
Presented and edited by Robin Deacon
Music composed by Loula Yorke