LA MOVIDA MADRILENA 1978/85: MADRID'S CLUB CULTURE

November 9/27, 2016

Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Street, London, EC2 3DT

“It’s difficult to speak of La Movida and explain it to those who didn’t live those years. We weren’t a generation; we weren’t an artistic movement; we weren’t a group with a concrete ideology. We were simply a bunch of people that coincided in one of the most explosive moments in the country.” Pedro Almodovar

This exhibition and project is jointly produced and curated by Ernesto Leal, Miguel Borrego, Javier Javier Astudillo’s  private archive collection, with photographs by  Miguel Trillo, Ouka Leele and supported by Instituto Cervantes and Spanish Embassy London.

About La Movida

La Movida was a creative, cross-discipline, counter-cultural movement that took over a neglected Spanish society between the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s.

Simmering beneath Franco’s Spain, a dictatorship that had ruled over the country for decades, La Movida was an outburst of creative expression that shaped the period of transition from a nation repressed under Franco, to an emerging, free thinking, more liberally minded Spain. With the death of the dictator, these musicians and artists were able to freely express and document a very different Spain to the one being portrayed in the mainstream. Whilst music was its main form of expression, all art forms were used to explore the marginalised as in: pornography, prostitution, gender roles and homosexuality.

La Movida’s favourite son is Pedro Almodóvar, whose first films such as “Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Monton” (1980) reflect the spirit of the movement. Other notable film directors of the time were: Fernando Trueba, Fernando Colomo and Ivan Zulueta.

La Movida’s preferred place to hangout was the Malasaña area of Madrid. Young people would meet in the Rock Ola (a temple of the Movida Movement). El Sol, La Vía Lactea, Carolina y La Penta, venues where you could hear live music & dj’s playing the latest sounds. Short films and paintings were projected onto the walls. The attitude and focus of the music were similar to the British New Wave or the Neue Deitsche Welle in that it mixed styles such as punk with rock as well as having strong influences from synthetic pop.

La Movida Madrileña exhibition  featured films, photographs, music, fanzines, posters, record sleeves and others objects documenting that time, as well as an exclusive screening of “A Freer Time Was Had By All”, a documentary by Beatriz Alonso Aranzábal.