Marta NIjhuis
PLAY IT AGAIN, BOMBE // An Elephant's Memory
Between Poetry and History: An Elephant’s Memory, a Collective Memory
Conversation Between the Curator and the Artist
Chiara Palermo Starting with "An Elephant’s Memory," your project accompanies us in a journey, which, from the city of Milan, Italy, takes us far beyond the boundaries of Bombay, India. In this exhibition, creation matches with documentation and poetry, fiction matches with history. The artist’s memories become the story of the city of Milan and of other cities, of the elephant Bombay, nicknamed Bombe, and of other wild animals populating our urban environment. This exhibition was inspired by the will to think of a way to make visible the stories emerging from your first encounter with Bombe, the elephant born in India, who lived in Milan between 1939 and 1988. Can you tell us more about this encounter?
Marta Nijhuis In a short novel I wrote on Bombe’s story [Suonala ancora, Bombe, Milan: Mimesis, 2015], I tell that one day, after I had been living in France for some time, I happened to be in Italy for the opening of an exhibition of my work, which took place in an ancient palace in front of the Public Gardens of Milan, where the zoo used to be.
That night, after a hard day’s work, the memory of Bombe literally took over me, probably awaken by the closeness to those places that had been so familiar to me, and which now appeared to be strangely crystallised in a sort of atemporal bubble. I could not think of anything else. Bombe: I had loved her so much, and yet, I had nearly forgotten her. You ask me to tell you about the first time I met Bombe. Well, the first time I actually felt I met her, was twenty-six years after her death, at the end of a long working day, when tiredness makes room for the emergency of the phantoms of oblivion, and memory shapes itself clearer, vivider, and more moving than ever. To me, Bombe is a placeless anachronism that, in virtue of its utopian crystallisation, ends up becoming the space and time of a narration rooted in a city of the soul, which is constituted at once of Milan, Bombay, and the distance between them, in a time dissolving wars, terrorism, and individual ambitions in a light music — that of the sad, yet happy sound of a barrel organ played by a trained elephant.
As you say, there is, in my work, a documentary matrix. The historical research is fundamental for my writing process and for my visual inspiration. However, after consulting the elephants transporters’ archives, after checking the detail of the bombings chronology in Milan during the Second World War, after travelling through books and documentaries in King George’s India and in the universe of pachyderms over two thousands years of Western collective imagination, poetry ends up mixing up all the certitudes of historical knowledge. It eventually bends the events in the direction of feelings, and hence breaks up the rigidity of the temporal line, making one go deep into the meanders of a past intertwining memory and oblivion, light and shadow, only to be captured in a crepuscular light, in which the essential side of things can finally be seen more clearly. The story is in fact that of Bombe, the elephant whom, in 1939, the white hunter Arduino Terni took away from King George’s India and brought to a fascist Milan. However, the memory emerging from it is that of an extraordinary journey between the animal and the human universes, between different generations, between the urban life and the charm of distances, between friendship and death — an intricate and untimely memory, which is part of all lives, in all places, in all times.