The Bloom Podcast
A podcast series by Lys Mehou-Loko and Dagmar van Weeghel (launching 2027)
What happens when a portrait starts a conversation?
Bloom is a limited podcast series extending Dutch artist Dagmar van Weeghel's acclaimed photographic portrait series. During the sessions that produced Bloom's portraits of women who moved to Europe from abroad, it became clear the conversations themselves carried something the camera couldn't contain: voices, stories, and unique trajectories. Hosted by Lys Mehou-Loko, one of the women portrayed in the original series, each episode gathers around a shared theme rather than a single biography.
Bloom is a conversation on contemporary migrant womanhood in Europe, with the generations who crossed borders before there was a vocabulary for "identity" or "belonging" at all. Among others, it aims to explore themes like arrival, language, power, race, visibility, belonging, work, legitimacy, love, connection, community, staying and leaving.
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Portrait by Dagmar van Weeghel, “LYS IN BLOOM”, 2026, hand painted archival pigment print on watercolor paper.
The team
The conversation will feature sitters who were part of the portrait series.
Lys Mehou-Loko, Creative Producer & Host
Lys was born in Togo and grew up between Benin and France, a start that set the course for a career spent moving between worlds. With two master's degrees from Sciences Po and more than a decade of experience spanning diplomacy, international development, and communications, including roles with the UN, French foreign affairs and Dutch development bank FMO, she has spent her career translating across cultures, institutions, and languages.
Lys is also one of the women portrayed in Dagmar van Weeghel's original Bloom series. Bloom the podcast grew out of that experience, as a recognition that what was said in those sessions deserved a form of its own.
Dagmar van Weeghel, Artist & Originator Dagmar van Weeghel is a Dutch visual artist and storyteller, trained as a filmmaker and photographer at the Netherlands Film Academy (AHK). Years spent living across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa shaped the questions at the heart of her work: how images are made, who gets to be seen, and what the archive leaves out. In Bloom, she uses nineteenth-century photographic techniques: an original 1868 carte-de-visite camera, hand-made anthotype pigments from foraged flowers, and the coded language of Victorian floriography, to confront the near-total absence of women of colour from Europe's early photographic record. Her work from the series was shown this past summer at the Alice Austen House in New York, alongside Kara Walker, Pipilotti Rist, and Linder.