Concept, text and performance: Marjolijn van Heemstra -
Virtual performance: Souad Abdallah, Satchit Puranik, Ntando Cele
Sound design: Roald van Oosten - Light design: Ramses van den Hurk - Director: Sanne van Rijn
Production : Frascati, with the support of VSB Founds


"People are more children of their time than they are children of their parents", writes historian Marc Bloch.

Writer and performer Marjolijn van Heemstra was born in 1981. For Family'81 she visits three people who were born in that same year in a different place in the world: Souad Abdallah (Lebanon), Ntando Cele (South Africa) and Satchit Puranik (India). As children of the same time, they are thus actually family.
With her three contemporaries, van Heemstra researches the years that raised them and the question what you share with people who lived the same days as you but in another part of the world.
The four contemporaries grew up in a world in which globalistion was the magic word and e-culture slowly brought all the corners of the earth within a hand’s reach. Through which invisible lines are their histories connected in this globalised world? Do they share a story bigger than their own?
In Family'81 van Heemstra reports on the recent history based on memories of four contemporaries. Michael Jackson, the Gulf War, riots in India, Nelson Mandela, Dolly the cloned sheep, reconstruction in Beirut and Mc Donalds in Mumbai. It is an attempt to get a grip on the indissoluble web of events that together form something called the common history. And a search for the bigger story of a generation.


© Anna van Kooij