Soil Biographies

Three versatile artists — Louis Vanhaverbeke, Melissa Mabesoone, and Farida Amadou — join forces for a sensory performance about earth, identity, and recovery. Drawing on their personal journeys, they collaborate on a performance that intertwines queer imagination, mental health, and rural soundscapes.

After a period of mental turmoil, Louis found stability in agriculture. Soil became his way of staying literally connected to the world. Melissa grew up as the daughter of a potato farmer in Zeeland and now cultivates that heritage as a performer and artist in the city, where she questions traditional gender roles with humor and sharpness in drag performances. Farida, a bassist in the international improvisation scene, delves into the origins of the blues as a black musician. She seeks a new form of rural music—raw, honest, unencumbered by clichés. 

Between flight and refuge, beauty and filth, lies a hybrid landscape of sound, movement, and transformation. A place to ground and degenerate with music as a language of care. This is not a classic story, but a living performance that invites the audience to feel, listen, and ground themselves together.

Soil Biographies is a performance about healing and origin, about the soil beneath our feet, and the voices rising from it.