Interview: Florencia Núñez, the artist who “wants to sing” to Uruguay’s picturesque landscape

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Picturesque villages half-buried in huge dunes, palm trees along the road leading to southern Brazil, or fishermen fishing by the light of lanterns in the lagoon and the ocean, are typical images of Rocha, one of the most beautiful and most visited Uruguayan destinations by national and foreign tourists.

That horizon is also forged by the sensory memory of its people, who remember the music and poems they grew up with and which are hardly known in the rest of the country, much less by those who visit the department (province) from outside Uruguay.

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Thus was born “Porque todas las quiero cantar”, a “multiplatform” film project in which singer-songwriter Florencia Núñez, pays tribute to the folklore “that has a critical dialogue with the landscape”, as she explains in an interview with Efe before the premiere of the film that follows the album released in 2020.

THE LANDSCAPE, A CONDITION

“The landscape conditions that kind of poetry, that kind of music, because it is linked to that way of doing, with those trades that the landscape gives you the way to develop, for example, the shrimp farmer,” argues the singer, one of the most outstanding young voices of the Uruguayan music scene.

She believes that authors such as Jaime Roos or Fernando Cabrera refer to Montevideo with their songs set in the Uruguayan capital, and that the same happens with the authors of her department (province), but, she adds, that “the region does not excel as much” and that “the work is rougher, it is more uphill.”

The film, directed and produced by her and which premieres this Thursday (5) after several postponements due to Covid-19, is a “road movie” in which Núñez covers local folklore songs, such as “Contigo y en el Palmar” or “Canción del camaronero”. At the same time, she reviews how these songs were born while touring places that served as an inspiration to their creators.

Satisfied with the result, she says that this project has left her as a “gift” the feedback received from “different groups of people, different ages, different contexts” about the emotion provoked by her reinterpretation of these songs.

“I have received a lot of messages of how, affectively, people have felt touched by the project (…) All the songs have touched an emotional fiber that, with my other albums, something so massive had not happened to me”, explains the author of “Mesopotamia” (2014) and “Palabra clásica” (2017).

FOLKLORE WITH A WOMAN’S VOICE

Núñez became in 2018 the first woman to be awarded the Graffiti Award (of Uruguayan music) for composer of the year, although she considers that the feminist claim is “a bit too big” for her.

“There were a lot of women who were breaking stones before so that I now do it naturally and do not question it, and also that those who give the award do not question whether it is a male or female category; but, indeed, breaking through that wall was not a task of mine,” says Núñez.

After mentioning legendary women of Uruguayan music, such as Amalia de la Vega, Vera Sienra, Laura Canoura or Estela Magnone, and others closer to her in time, such as Samantha Navarro, Rossana Taddei or Ana Prada, the singer emphasizes “that now things are changing” and that women have been opening doors in society as a whole, which allows broadening “looks so that other things begin to be seen”.

“Society has always worked in favor of men, and, logically, male figures have emerged as singers and poets and not so many female ones,” says Núñez, who argues that all the songs in this project “are composed by men and performed by men” and had to adapt them “with a feminine tone of voice, with other arrangements and a different sensitivity than the male one.”

In the midst of a pandemic that has devastated, among other groups, the world of culture, the singer-songwriter maintains the hope that “there can really be a cultural explosion after this”, even though she is aware of the economic difficulties of the general public.

And, while she smiles – without revealing more details – thinking about her new album, she defends with emotion the project in which she launches “an anchor” to the landscape of her native Rocha.