A leading voice in contemporary Brazilian music, Bia Ferreira makes music a space of resistance, healing and liberation. Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and artivist, she commands the stage with a magnetic presence, as powerful as it is tender.
She named her sound herself: MMP — Música de Mulher Preta, “Black Woman’s Music.” A genre she had to invent because no other could hold all of it at once: where she comes from, what she carries, what she stands for. Structural racism, queerphobia, Black feminism, love, tenderness, community, Bia Ferreira never separates the struggle from the joy. None of it stays abstract. It lives in the body, the voice, the rhythm. Her lyrics belong to what’s called escrevivência, writing-from-life, where the personal turns collective and autobiography becomes social critique.
From soul, reggae, rap, R&B, funk and blues to the traditions of Brazil — samba, the Northeastern repente — every song is a statement and an invitation to dance. Alone on stage with her guitar, she conjures a whole orchestra: strings, slap bass and percussion, layered with beatbox, whistling and a flow that turns from furious to tender. She performs like an exposed nerve and disarms you with a laugh.
Bia Ferreira broke through in 2017 with Cota Não É Esmola — a track that drew fourteen million views and earned a place on the University of Brasília’s entrance-exam reading list. Since then, her reach has spread far beyond Brazil, helped by a standout showcase at WOMEX Lisbon in 2022. Her music teaches without lecturing and brings people together without dumbing anything down: it wins you over with rhythm, then opens the mind.
These days, her fight moves through love, tenderness and listening, too. Bia Ferreira doesn’t only call things out, she sows seeds, mends the imagination, reminds marginalized bodies that they are not alone. Her voice turns anger into movement, vulnerability into power, and the stage into a place where a whole room sings as one. Come for a concert that’s really a crossing, you won’t leave the way you came in.
STIB Marconi Depot
You’ve probably walked past it without ever noticing. On the edge of Uccle, Forest and Drogenbos, hidden behind a 140-metre sound wall, sleeps an entire fleet of Brussels trams. Welcome to the Marconi depot. Picture this: 27,000 m² of hangar, 22 tracks, 75 trams quietly resting and 170 workers keeping Brussels on the move. An unlikely acoustic, light bouncing off the metal. There’s your stage.
This is no ordinary depot. It’s a building that thinks ahead. Heat pump, 600 solar panels, smart LED lighting and a rainwater tank that washes the trams. Here, nothing goes to waste. Tucked into its green setting, the depot is wrapped in native plants, framed by the regional green walk, and home to a small nursery run by students from the Uccle Horticultural School. A blueprint for the depots of tomorrow. Promise: next time you hop on the 4, the 82 or the 92, you’ll know where they come from. And where they go to sleep.
© STIB
