Marjolein van Heemstra

Biography

Author Marjolijn van Heemstra (1981) is fascinated by the limitations that face humans – their mortality, their limited senses and language, their mental loneliness – and their attempts to get beyond these limitations.

In her recent theatre work, Van Heemstra increasingly explicitly links her philosophical deliberations to current political and societal themes. In 2009, at the invitation of the Goethe Instituut at Frascati she wrote the text 2012 (directed by Julie van den Berghe), occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. She outlined a surrealist game show suspiciously similar to the boundless world of 1989: a world without certainty or direction for determining what is of value. For the project Tegen de tijd (2010) she and writer Hannah van Wieringen engaged in conversation with old age pensioners about the final boundary of human existence: death.