Soil Biographies – Unearthing discomfort
Interview with Farida Amadou and Louis Vanhaverbeke
How are your own artistic practices connected to Soil Biographies?
Louis Vanhaverbeke – I come from a background in the visual arts and dance. In this performance, I am once again exploring the relationship between my body and that of another performer, as well as the relationship between the soil and objects with which I have a personal connection. It’s an exploration I’ve been undertaking for a very long time, and each time, with every new project, it’s different. This ‘autobiographical object dance’, as I might dare to call it, is primarily shaped by the relationship with Farida as a performer and the earth as a co-performer in the piece.
Farida Amadou – For me, vibrations are the link. I play the bass guitar in unconventional ways and am always on the lookout for sounds akin to the tone of a bass, such as sounds that come from the ground. When we walk on the ground – whatever type of ground it may be – we make a sound and our bodies vibrate along with it. We don’t feel those vibrations, but so much around us vibrates without us seeing or feeling it. And I try to make that tangible with my instrument. Louis’s body will also vibrate in unison, as will the soil we’re working with.
Could you tell us more about the unconventional ways in which you play your instrument or use objects?
Farida – What I do with my instrument is what any child would do with any instrument: exploring and investigating it, playing with it, discovering how each part of the instrument sounds differently. In the musical improvisation scene, this is called ‘extended techniques’: using objects, plugging the bass into electronics to modify the output, and so on. Any unimaginable way of playing an electric bass. Children don’t think in boxes; they don’t know what blues, jazz or classical music are. They don’t judge. I try to do the same in my practice: let go of all those labels and experience the moment.
Louis – The same applies to my relationship with the objects I use in my performances. We’re conditioned to think that a book must be read from start to finish, that there’s a logical coherence to it. But we also have an emotional or biographical connection to it. You might have been given the book by someone, or you might have found it somewhere. The title appeals to you, or it’s still on your reading wish list. The object is already loaded with meaning, even before you use it in the ‘proper’ way. I think this is an approach I apply throughout my practice. How can we take objects out of their context and thereby say something about the relationship we have with them? And often that yields unexpected answers. In a previous performance, for example, I blew into a watering can as if it were a trumpet. The audience saw someone playing a watering can like a musical instrument, taking it completely out of its usual context. That’s how you create new images.
Where does the title Soil Biographies come from, and what does it mean to you?
Farida – Soil Biographies is about what it means to feel at home and grounded somewhere. How you can feel at home in one place, and not at all in another. As the child of a first-generation refugee, I grew up in a country that isn’t really my own. What does it mean to feel grounded in a place far away from your roots? I try to tell my personal story of growing up in Belgium, coming from Niger, and how I have to adapt wherever I go to feel grounded. And I use my instrument to do that. In that sense, music is very healing for me. I love playing music and going on tour, because wherever I go with my instrument, I feel at home.
Louis – This ‘grounding’ is also an important theme for me. It’s something I’ve been trying to get a hold of for years, following a period of mental vulnerability and a breakdown. It’s interesting to explore this theme artistically. In this project, I approach the ground as a metaphor. How does grounding take place, and what lies dormant or hidden beneath the surface? The performance is called Soil Biographies, because we’re both exploring this theme through our own life stories.
Would you say you’re writing a new biography?
Louis – I suppose so, yes. I think it would be difficult to share our own life stories without adding a new narrative to them. New in the sense that it’s very unusual for me to address uncomfortable and subconscious issues in a work of art. I find it quite a challenge and it evokes emotions that are sometimes hard to pin down. It’s a performance that comes from the very depths of our hearts.
The performance also aims to invite the audience to unearth their own uncomfortable truths.
Farida – The contrast between comfortable and uncomfortable is interesting, because the soil is actually very comfortable. We lie on it every day, but what lies beneath is less comfortable. For me, these are things you cannot reveal. They are not objects, but matters that exist unconsciously and which I try to express through my music. I was saying just yesterday: the soil is our friend, but sometimes it isn’t, because we want to hide things beneath it that we don’t want to see, such as traumatic experiences.
Louis – For me, it’s about objects that symbolise certain chapters of my life that I’d rather keep hidden. And sometimes, when I’m working with the soil, the very best thing is to put them back again. This act of unearthing uncomfortable things and the possibility of burying them again is a metaphor for what we do in life.
You both share a fascination with the presence of the body and sharing a moment with the audience in the same space. How will this take shape in the performance?
Farida – The music I play is improvised music. I improvise based on the moment, the space and the people in that space. I can never play the same thing twice. Even if I wanted to, it would never be the same, because our bodies resonate together which affects how the music sounds. I’m going to apply the same principle in Soil Biographies. The audience takes part in the performance simply by being there and listening. I do everything together with the audience, rather than specifically for the audience.
Generally speaking, the performing arts operate within a more rigid framework than the music world, even though the live aspect means that every performance is different.
Louis – What Farida says really resonates with me, because my work is seen as fixed, with a specific sequence of actions at specific moments during the performance. But I feel that every evening is different, and is indeed shaped by the people in the audience and the interaction I have with them. I always play with that energy. It’s both challenging and fun. In the case of Soil Biographies, the framework is an eight-by-eight-metre area of soil, and us bringing our practices into that space. The soil acts as a body to which we connect our practices, and the audience adds a perspective and many dimensions that we have to take into account.
What instruments will be used, or what objects will be used as instruments?
Farida – I’m going to play the bass guitar, of course.
Louis – My objects will be directly linked to text – text that relates to my personal history and my body. I’ve used my voice in performances before, but in this piece the text takes on a different significance. I’ll be thinking less about the sound and the sonority of my voice and more about the meaning of what I say.
Could you tell us a bit about the developments during the creative process?
Louis – We’ve been working on this project for almost a year now, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that ‘the uncomfortable’ will bubble up from the ground we’re digging in and into which we’re submerging our bodies. At the start of the process, we’d highlighted this in our mind maps: unconscious, uncomfortable things hidden beneath the earth. You can name it conceptually, but you don’t know exactly how it will come to life. And I think we’re still grappling with quite a few questions: How do you perceive things differently? What are the things that cause friction in this triangular relationship between Farida, the soil and myself?
Farida – We’ve spent a great deal of time naming things, and now they’re appearing; they’re literally rising up from the ground.
Louis – To give an example: a few weeks ago I was still busy with plants, because the soil is, in a sense, very dark and heavy; I need greenery, I need something that grows, I need life. So I started experimenting with plants. But I immediately sensed that wasn’t really the point of the project. It’s precisely about what’s hidden, it’s about the uncomfortable, and that is actually the soil itself.
Farida – I have a feeling that, despite everything, the soil will also be a playground. I will play with the soil as if it were an instrument and bring it to life, visually as well. The soil is our friend, and at the same time our enemy.
Interview conducted by Ellen De Bruyne and Lauren Borremans on 1 October 2026