The lesser known facets of Amália Rodriguesas a poet or actress, are intertwined in a new immersive exhibition in Lisbon, which opened this week and seeks to rediscover Portugal’s best-known voice in the year of the 25th anniversary of her death.
“Ah, Amália.”installed in the Marvila neighborhood and created by the Amália Rodrigues Foundation and the production company SP Entertainment, takes a tour of the life of the “rainha do fado (queen of fado)” throughout eight rooms with 360-degree projections, holograms, virtual reality and a sample of her legacy to get to know her inner side. a stranger. She was very well known for her voice, for her genius in singing fado, but the truth is that she did not only sing fado. She also sang Mexican rancheras and the Italian songbook,” explained the president of the foundation, Vicente Rodrigues, during a press visit.
Although she rose to fame for her voice, Amália (1920-1999) was also a theater and film actress and wrote poetry, Rodrigues recalled, noting that it is the first time that an immersive biography of a Portuguese personality has been organized. All these facets are explored during the exhibition, with a chronology of her life, her records, films and her book of poems, as well as an exhibition with pieces of her legacy such as jewelry, glasses or shoes that she used in her performances.
The tour leads to a room with multimedia projections and 360-degree videomapping that envelop the visitor in the world of the fadista, while her famous song plays in the background.Strange way of life‘. Another space with mirrors and colored light bulbs that evoke the flowering of cherry trees recalls one of the artist’s most famous details: it is not known for sure what day she was born.
“I don’t know the day I was born. “My grandmother said that I was born during the cherry season, which runs from May to July,” Amália said in her biography, who chose July 1 to celebrate her birthday, although she was registered in the official registry on July 23. from 1920.
Her life went through all seasons of the year and that aspect is captured in another room where virtual reality glasses are used to watch ‘The Four Seasons of Amália’, which the organizers define as a “visual poem” for know the past and present of the fadista.
It is the most intimate and poetic facet of Amália, which the exhibition wants to show in addition to her professional career. She “she was a woman very ahead of her time, very supportive, very friendly to others. With this exhibition we wanted to show the Portuguese and the tourists who visit us the different facets of Amália and the great dimension that she had as a person,” said the president of the foundation that bears her name.
That dimension inspired artists who later followed in their footsteps, such as the fado singer Cuca Roseta, present during the visit. “For me she is an inspiration as a woman, she was a great woman, not only a great singer, she was a great poet with great sensitivity, irreverent, very ahead of her time. A free woman to be able to be herself following her intuition,” she said.
Roseta also recalled that Amália opened the doors of stages abroad to many fadistas “at a time when it was much more difficult to travel and conquer the public.” That enormous international projection, which took her to cities as diverse as Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Bangkok, is also explored in the exhibition, which closes with one of its crowning moments: a performance at the Olympia in Paris, recreated with a life-size hologram. The immersive exhibition opens this Wednesday and, for the moment, does not have a closing date.
Source EFE
[Fotos: EFE Daniel Beltrá y Paula Fernández]
