shoe/farm

“What we used to eat, we now put on your feet!” In shoe/farm - a family business ‘shoe shop’ and ‘farm’ merge into a fictional family business. Picturesque scenes portray a farm where shoes are grown, harvested, branded, and sold. As daughters of a shoe shop and a farm, Oshin Albrecht and Melissa Mabesoone question how family ties and background influence ideas about labour, class and family. What does it mean to be an heir in addition to being a ‘child of’? Homegrown and self-made? In buren’s first group performance for the black box, they perform specific tasks as a team and family of four. From a collection of clogs, glass boots, and denim shoes, they shine a light on fetishistic relationships to the shoe and contemplate what it would be like to stand in someone else’s shoes. From the low-wage worker in the shoe factory to the have-it-all fashionista. In a playful and layered way, they manoeuvre from a pre-industrial era to late capitalism. The performance is situated between music theatre, visual performance, and choreography; with instruments and props that are part of the scenography, they shape music, sound, and rhythm out of work-related actions and assembly-line work. • ‘buren’ is a collective founded by Oshin Albrecht and Melissa Mabesoone in 2012. Through performance, video, text, objects, photography, publication and installation they navigate ideas of community, domesticity, gender roles, (art) history and neoliberal fantasies. buren focuses on the de- and reconstruction of image and language. They approach the scene as a critical playground. From 2023 onwards buren is one of the house residents at Kaaitheater, Brussels.