Cinema, Podium en
Werkplek in Kortrijk

Sarah Vanhee / CAMPO

Mémé

1h30
Performance
West Flemish, Dutch and English spoken, English and Dutch subtitles | 16+ | smoke | darkness | a lot of text
Budascoop
Pay what you can (€0/€5/€10/€15/€20/€25)
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CUBO

Theatre maker honours grandmothers

In Mémé, Sarah Vanhee questions our relationship with our ancestors, with the (native) soil, and with the female body. On stage, Vanhee is joined by puppets, ghosts and a child. The ghosts are of both her West Flemish grandmothers who dedicated their lives to ‘labour’ in both senses of the word – giving birth and raising children as well as working in the home and ‘in the fields’.

How does today’s world relate to those forgotten female ancestors and to the soil they cultivated? How do we see them reflected in today’s forgotten women, whose labour is still being exploited?

Mémé is a layered and multilingual ode to those ‘invisible’ women, to Mother Earth and to life itself. It is Vanhee’s ritual attempt to bring her grandmothers back to life, to re-connect with them, and then – this time differently – to say goodbye, unbounded by time.

Combine ‘Mémé’ on Friday 7 July with ‘Love’ by Florin Flueras and ‘Have a Safe Travel’ by Eli Mathieu-Bustos.

Sarah Vanhee (1980, Ostend) is an internationally renowned artist, performer and author, whose work has been seen in major performing arts contexts, as well as in the visual arts, film and literature over the past 15 years. Vanhee moves between the public space and the institutional art field. She worked in prisons, private living rooms, open fields, theatres, on public canvases, in corporate meeting rooms, etc. Recent works include bodies of knowledge (nomadic class), undercurrents (intervention), collected screams (lecture performance), Unforetold (stage performance), The Making of Justice (film), Oblivion (stage performance), Untitled (meetings in private houses) and Lecture For Every One (a series of lectures through which she ‘broke into’ existing meetings).

Play dates

  • mémé

concept, text & performance Sarah Vanhee
objects & scenography Toztli Abril de Dios
sound Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti
outside eye Christine De Smedt
technicGeeraard Respeel & Babette Poncelet
performance on screen Leander Polzer Vanhee
with the input of family Vanhee-Deseure
production CAMPO
co-production Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussel), Kaaitheater (Brussel), Wiener Festwochen (Wenen), BUDA (Kortrijk), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlijn), De Grote Post (Oostende), Théâtre de la Bastille (Paris), Festival d’Automne à Paris & Perpodium
residencies KWP Kunstenwerkplaats (Brussel), Kaaitheater (Brussel) & BUDA (Kortrijk)
met de steun van
de taxshelter van de Belgische Federale Overheid via uFund

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