A living exhibit of natural and political history
If she were a plant, she would be called Amalia melancholia. She wished that history would give her the title of Queen of the Palm Trees. A play about the woman who was stigmatized for her childlessness but gave Athens its National Garden.
Modern medical studies attribute Amalia’s infertility to unknown aplasia, which, if known at the time, would have made the first queen of Greece a monster, a bad omen for the great reboot of the state. She was subjected to fertility treatments for sixteen years, and after death to an autopsy. The examination of the fifty-six-year-old woman revealed findings which had to be suppressed.
Her failure to offer a child to the people had political implications. However, from Amalia’s vision, a ‘child’ was indeed born: a garden. Although many busts of illustrious men are found in the garden, there is not a single official reference to this day to the woman who dreamt of the garden and made it come true.
Zoe Chatziantoniou draws material from Amalia’s letters to her father, individual historical testimonies, and the confidential documents of the doctors. Her Amalia is a woman between fiction and history, infertility and fertility, museum exhibit and animal under observation for breeding purposes. She is a body in a state of creative melancholy that finds its own line of flight towards another dimension beyond social imperatives. There, in her true kingdom, Amalia fulfils her mission and perpetuates her species – she becomes a Garden. She is given what she herself truly longed for, the title of Queen of the Palm Trees.