In shoe/farm – a family business, a shoe shop and a farm merge into a fictional family-run company. In painterly tableaus, a real shoe farm is portrayed, where shoes are grown, harvested, branded and sold. Potatoes make way for Buffaloes on the counter. This is buren’s first group creation: as a team and a family of four, they execute specific tasks but are also interchangeable on the production line. This performance holds the middle ground between musical theatre, visual performance and choreography. With instruments and props as part of the scenography, they shape music, sound and rhythm from work-related actions on an assembly line.

As daughters of a shoe shop and a farm, Melissa Mabesoone and Oshin Albrecht question how family ties and background influence ideas about labour, class and family. What does it mean to be not just a child, but also an heir? Home-grown and self-made? Using a collection of clogs, glass boots and jeans shoes, they expose fetishist relations to the shoe and think about what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes: from a low-wage labourer in a shoe factory to a have-it-all fashionista. In a playful and layered manner, they manoeuvre between pre-industrialism and late capitalism.