shoe/farm - a family business

"What we used to eat, we now put on your feet!"

‘Shoe shop’ and ‘farm’ merge in a fictional family business. Picturesque scenes portray a real shoe farm, where shoes are grown, harvested, branded, and sold. Potatoes are exchanged for buffaloes that roll over the counter. In buren’s first group performance for the black box, they perform specific tasks as a team and family of four – although each member is simultaneously interchangeable within the production line. 

The performance is situated in 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. 

As people raised in a shoe shop and a farm, Oshin and Melissa ask themselves questions about how family ties and origins influence ideas about work, class, and money. What does it mean to be an heir in addition to being a ‘child of’? Homegrown and self-made? 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. 

• In late 2012, Oshin Albrecht and Melissa Mabesoone co-founded the buren collective. buren functions as a noun and a verb; an umbrella term for their practice and a modus operandi. Through performance, video, text, objects, photography, and installation, they move between ideas of community, domesticity, gender, (art) history, and neoliberal fantasies. Their work has a strong visual character, with a particular focus on humour, the musicality of text, and sound as a means of communication. On stage they create a critical playing field with a dreamlike dramaturgy. 

buren’s cross-over practice can be seen in visual arts- and theatre-related contexts such as Playground (STUK / Museum M), viernulvier, Pukkelpop, de Brakke Grond, Netwerk Aalst, Galerie AmPolylog, Z33, Buda, Bâtard, Kaaitheater, Casco, and Tatjana Pieters, and has brought out publications with het balanseer and Posture Editions. From 2016–2017 buren did a postgraduate degree at HISK, from 2020–2024 part of the European Apap - Feminist Futures network via Buda, and since 2023 they have been one of the 3 house artists at Kaaitheater.