National Railway Museum receives Steam Festival
The National Railway Museum (MNF), in Entroncamento, district of Santarém, will host the Vapor Festival “A Steampunk Circus” from Friday to Sunday, an invitation to a “trip to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution”.
The festival will take place in Portugal for the first time, and will take advantage of the MNF scenery, with preserved industrial buildings hosting large machines, many of them steam technology, for a program that includes music, cinema, games, talks, workshops, , exhibitions and parades, states the text of the presentation of the museum.
A subgenre of science fiction that became known in the late 1980s and early 1990s, steampunk is presented as an aesthetic chain that “associates characteristics of the Punk movement with the development provided by the discovery of Steam, in an environment of the century, in Victorian England, “he says.
Noting that this type of event “already moves crowds at an international level,” the MNF says it expects from avant-garde audiences and alternative artistic productions to families seeking entertainment, with access to the museum and festival free.
Over the course of three days, there is a steampunk handicraft fair, book fair, a Victorian carousel, mini-train rides and rail quadricycles, board games, railway modeling and street food.
On Friday, the “Custom Circus” show “Absurdium” is scheduled and animated by the Steampunk Lisbon League, and on Saturday, Katy O’Down, a writer of steampunk-inspired fiction books, talk about it on the international scene “.
On that day, in the outer spaces of the museum you will see an exhibition of classic vehicles, and a concert of the Dead Combo will take place at night.
On Sunday, there is a ‘workshop’ and ‘show’ of ‘Steampunk Hip-hop’, by the animator, British singer and presenter Elemental, and a writing workshop, ‘What you see is less than what you get’, by Forum Fantastic.
“Steampunk aesthetics include machines and real-world machines created before their time and / or imaginary machines and instruments based on futurist theories and ideas,” and has “evolved far beyond its original literary concept,” “to include various artistic expressions, including fashion, combining nineteenth-century styles with current trends and elements from the universe of the fantastic,” states the MNF note.
