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Don't miss Marta's RSI (Radio Svizzera Italiana) 

interview apropos of the protagonist of her novel and play, "Suonala ancora, Bombe".

Click here to listen

Play It Again, Bombe // An Elephant's Memory is a transmedial artistic project conceived by Marta Nijhuis.  

Marta's work focuses on the topic of cultural memory, which she elaborates by bringing back to light lost tales born out of mixed cultures.

In 2014, Marta started working on the story of Bombay, a naturalised Italian, born Indian, "whose sensitivity was marked by the same historical experiences that shaped the generation of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino." (Giovanna Borradori, 2015). Bombay was not a human, though: she was an elephant, that is, in the collective imagination, Memory at its purest. Her story, which Marta renders through images and writings, opens up to an intense range of emotions and philosophical questionings. 

In 2015, after a careful work of research and writing, Marta published Suonala ancora, Bombe [Play It Again, Bombe], a short novel that soon became a theatre play. Directed by Paolo Bignamini, it was performed by Mario Cei through 2015 and 2016 both in Italy and France. The show was conceived in relation with a video-scenography realised by Marta Nijhuis and her fellow colleague AnnaCaterina Dalmasso under the pseudonym of Ahura-Mazdā

Such a work of video-art was the first step for the exhibition project "An Elephant's Memory//Urban Wilderness," which features installations, drawings, and paintings. In virtue of the project's strong intercultural characteristic, the exhibition curator Chiara Palermo decided to ask the Maison de l'International of Grenoble, France — a public institution devoted to multicultural exchange — to welcome it. In November 2016 the Maison was the first home to this show. 

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