Thursday 4 December 2025, 7.30pm
Another excellent line-up from Infant Tree, featuring British-born, Strasbourg-based poet, songwriter, guitarist, and singer Zoe Heselton, Strasbourg-based bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy player Lise Barkas, and London-based artist Zara Joan Miller, who works across poetry, performance and film.
Zoe Heselton is a British-born poet, songwriter, guitarist, and singer based in Strasbourg. Her music – steeped in traditional, folk, blues, and flamenco influences, spoken word poetry, and a wide range of eclectic and experimental inspirations – is both intimate and vibrant. Performed with a fierce yet sensitive electric guitar, her music moves between vulnerability and power, exploring themes of darkness and healing. Moving between melody and dissonance, her songs are litanies for survival, poems of tenderness and rage.
Released in April 2025 on the Teenage Menopause Records label, her debut studio album ‘Another Kind of Suicide‘ was the result of a decade-long writing process. For the project, she assembled a band she named Sister Outsider— after a poem by Audre Lorde. The group features Inès Rousset (bass), Merve Salgar (tanbur), Lise Barkas (hurdy-gurdy), Liliane Chansard (vocals), Quentyn Risjeterre (bells), and Harutaka Mochizuki (saxophone).
Lise Barkas is a bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy player based in Strasbourg, France. She has honed her instrumental craft in folk ball dances and noise gigs alike. Her playing is informed by recent traditional music revivals and encounters with fellow experimentalists and improvisers. In addition to playing solo acoustic sets, she has been pursuing collaborations with a variety of musicians, including Yann Leguay, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy and Zoe Heselton.
Zara Joan Miller is a British/Iranian artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her writing often situates itself in communal time(keeping) and space before taking root in the private body. BLUE MONDAY was published by JOAN Publishing in 2022 and her second book of poetry Year of the Dragon is forthcoming with TACO! Recent solo performances draw from ongoing research into abjection, lactation and personal ancestry. Her work has recently been presented at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Barbican Centre, Maximilian William Gallery, Les Atelier Claus, Horse Hospital, In Vitro, Default Den Haag and has appeared in motor dance journal, Fieldnotes journal, Hotel, Another Gaze and Worms Magazine. Blue Monday was also released as a duo LP with Ute Kanngießer on New York label Reading Group in 2023.
