Issued as part of ¡Viva! Spanish & Latin American Festival 2017, La Movida is set to be HOME’s next major exhibition. The piece offers a contemporary view of the socio-cultural movement La Movida – literally translating as “the movement”.
The movement took place between 1977 and 1985, and was set in post-Franco Spain. During this period, the country aimed to rid themselves of the cultural delay that had followed Franco’s reign. In order to move into a state of democracy, La Movida opened up the public eye to the taboo notions of open debate, sexuality, pornography, clubbing and drugs to name a few.
The popular Spanish saying “If you lived in the 80s and remember it, then you didn’t live it.” is said to encapsulate what it is that La Movida stands for.
Pedro Almodóvar, renowned Spanish film director and former member of the movement explained, “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.”
The exhibition boasts new commissions inspired by this problematic time period, along with various national works that revolve around the themes of freedom and excess. La Movida was certainly a movement ahead of its time, and it is no surprise that we see it coming up as inspiration for contemporary artworks to this day, forty years after the transition to democracy.
Group exhibition: La Movida at HOME, Manchester. 14 April–11 June 2017.
