Linda Sarki Johnson - Stéphanie Mwamba - Diana Odhiambo — Bambu 2026

BAMBU is a project that builds cultural relationships between Italy and Sub-Saharan Africa through a principle of concrete, reciprocal, and non-hierarchical collaboration. Rather than a showcase, it is a space of encounter between artists, programmers, and contexts, created to bring forward the vitality of the contemporary African scene and to generate lasting connections between practices, visions, and institutions. For its second edition, BAMBU presents three short solos by three female authors from the equatorial African region — Linda Sarki Johnson (Nigeria), Stéphanie Mwamba (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Diana Odhiambo (Kenya)—who, from different perspectives, interrogate the social and symbolic universe of the feminine, creating tensions between tradition and cosmopolitanism, memory and transformation. Each evening is accompanied by a public talk moderated by Roberto Castello.

In MAHAKA, a solo choreographed and performed by Linda Sarki Johnson, the body becomes a site of emancipation and reinvention. The title, meaning “freedom” in the Irigwe language, announces a journey of liberation from the constraints of tradition towards new possibilities of movement, expression, and self-affirmation. Rooted in an improvisational practice deeply connected to African matrices of gesture and rhythm, the work transforms interference, distraction, and rupture of flow into creative material, giving rise to a dance that celebrates individuality as an act of resistance and self-discovery.

With KIZAZI, Stéphanie Mwamba constructs a dance of memory, transmission, and metamorphosis, in which Congolese tradition enters into dialogue with contemporary choreographic practices. The body here becomes a living archive, traversed by ancestral traces, life cycles, buried emotions, and female genealogies. It is an intimate and ritual work that looks at the womb as a site of memory and creative matrix, and at dance as a tool for reconnecting with an originary, organic, and telluric force.

In THIN LINE, Diana Odhiambo draws on her own experience as one of the very few contemporary dancers active in Kisumu, Kenya, to shape a work that is both personal and political. Through the interplay of movement, text, music, and voice, the solo brings to light the often-silenced stories of African mothers and the struggles that continue to resonate in the bodies of their daughters, seeking a fragile yet necessary balance between decolonisation and cultural preservation, between individual wound and collective memory.