Soil Readings with
Federico Protto and Hanne Van Dyck
11th December 2025
Lecture performances /// Doors open @7PM
Hanne Van Dyck
Autobiography of a Volcanic Force traces the body’s journey as a volcanic terrain—descending into its own depths, rupturing, and emerging transformed.
It stages a ritual passage through bodily descent, confrontation, and volatile transformation. Moving through layered terrains of the self, it enters states of abjection and dissolution as necessary thresholds for change.
Spoken text conjures tremor, vomit, moans, and breath, shaping an archetypal drama that is both personal and collective. The performance enacts a cycle of yielding and reclamation, descending into buried matter and returning altered, charged, and alive. Its structure is rhythmic and breath-driven, marked by propulsion and suspension that mirror the body’s negotiations of fear, desire, and release. The ending carries an unmistakable erotic voltage, signaling a messy rebirth.
Federico Protto
Aprender Ser Ese Ser (Spanish for ‘To learn to be that being’) is a lecture-performance by Federico Protto that emerges from the artist book of the same title. The publication gathers three years of artistic research developed within the project MAPA, tracing a triangle of concerns: colonialism and migration, love and belonging, and art and labor. Across poems, diary entrances, thought fragments and performance texts, it moves through attempts to understand one’s own trajectories in the world - the movements inherited, chosen, resisted - and how these shape the ways we relate, attach, and imagine and feel togetherness.
In the performance, a selection of these writings is interwoven with songs (mostly performed acapella). This simple juxtaposition of voice and word creates a living archive: an intimate excavation site where past, present, and future overlap.
Many of the texts look towards nature - to soil, ground, sediment, waters - practicing a methodology Federico calls polyamorous archaeology: a way of sensing multiple times, stories, and ancestors at once, as if listening and observing to the earth through several somatic and emotional lenses. Through this practice, the performance traces the bonds between places and displacement, memory and imagination, self and the many beings we are and could become. Aprender Ser Ese Ser invites the into this layered landscape, where learning to 'be that being' is an ongoing, tender process.
The publication was co-produced by workspacebrussels and the kind support of Teresa Scutti. The edition of 10 was hand-bound by Johanne Mortgat Shan. The graphic design was made by Dariusz Wekwert. Federico Protto is supported by the Flemish Ministry of Culture.
www.federicoprotto.com
IG @faeiodaeiou