Mira Verhoeven

Change the Guards

‘Change the Guards’ is an exploration of a queer girl-body growing up amidst the military and patriarchal traditions of her forefathers. It is a personal object-performance about tradition, (male) dress-up, and community.

Inspired by personal memories and interviews with the schutterij from Mira’s town of birth — a centuries-old Limburg association characterised by historical uniforms, strict regulations, and shooting competitions — Mira builds a fictional archive filled with costumes, estranged artefacts, and symbols. She invites you into her story, not as a distant archivist, but as an embodied part of history that distorts, rewrites, and recreates.

A return to abandoned heritage.
An intimate appropriation of collective tradition.

Mira Verhoeven is a maker-collector and graduated from the Performance programme at the Theatre Academy Maastricht in 2024. They create interdisciplinary performances and installations

Mira collects and reuses materials from all kinds of disciplines, from theatre and fashion to poetry, and from the emotional and spiritual to the scientific. They subsequently cut and paste these materials into performative collages. In this patchwork of form and content, Mira explores themes of care and consolation in our hyper-globalised, late-capitalist, ever-more-technologised world.