The Foto Colectania gallery brings together the work of photographers Albert García-Alix, Ouka Leele, Pablo Pérez-Mínguez and Miguel Trillo in 'La Movida. Chronicle of an agitation. 1978-1988 '
"We were lucky to be at the right time in the right place and live a wonderful story," says Alberto García-Alix about La Movida, that kind of measles of freedom and creativity that shook Madrid's Tierno Galván in full Transition . "In fact, I regret not having taken more photos and not having had more awareness of the moment I was living," acknowledges the photographer, who along with Ouka Leele, Pablo Pérez-Mínguez and Miguel Trillo stars in the exhibition La Movida. Chronicle of an agitation. 1978-1988 in the Photo Colectania gallery in Barcelona, an exquisite visual journey (and not only, because there are also short films and audiovisual pieces in the exhibition) to those years of freshness, color, carelessness, experimentation and death.
Miguel Trillo affirms that without the freedom that little by little he began to intuit, he would not have been able to take all the portraits he made, most anonymous faces of young people who attended concerts with their best galas , almost always in strict black and with a lot of lacquer . "Without the freedom that was beginning to break through, people would have thought that I was a policeman of the Social's countryman, because at that time the police were the ones with the best photographic archive of urban tribes," he says. La Movida exploded, according to Trillo, thanks to music. The new groups needed rooms to play in and thanks to that explosion of nightlife, a new scene filled with "smoke, noise and darkness" emerged. "I photographed the detail of a cowboy, a wristband, a hairstyle, the space of a place and I wondered why those photos were considered contemporary art in New York and not in Spain ."
A study of Madrid's urban tribes
Trillo remembers perfectly the moment in which he decided to stop photographing the stars on the stage to focus on the public, a "democratization of the spotlight" that began at the Rolling Stones concert in 82 and ended up giving body to all his Photographic work, a kind of study of urban tribes in Spain over the decades. He also remembers one of his first exhibitions, in which he sold photocopies of his photographs to 500 pesetas and that kind of effervescent disorientation that permeated everything: "We didn't know what the Movida was, we knew we were moved." Death, remember, was also very present during those years . Not only for all the thousands of lives that took the heroine ahead, one of the central themes of García-Alix, but for the tragic deaths of Eduardo Benavente, José Enrique Cano Leal, Canito, of the group Los Secretos or Demetrio Jesús Lefler in a fight between mods and rockers that caused the closure of the Rock-Ola room, which marked the entire scene.
For García-Alix, the roots of La Movida are in Barcelona . "This is where we came in 76 and 77, where the new was, the trends, and there was an air of freedom that there was not in Madrid. In Barcelona were the first magazines that gave us the possibility of publishing, such as Star ", the photographer remembers, from which you can see a handful of first copies of some of his most iconic black and white portraits like Ana Curra waiting for my kisses . "La Movida was born in the underground and died in the underground, then the story put her somewhere else. She succeeded when she died, like everything in general," he reflects.
La Movida Reef
From Ouka Leele, the pseudonym of Barbara Allende Gil de Biedma, you can see her originals painted with watercolor, in colors that seem to have come from another galaxy. There is his celebrated self-portrait Hairdresser in which he appears with a halo of lemons drinking with a straw and other classics such as The Kiss or his hilarious series The hairdresser , which is projected on one of the walls of the room.
Who was very clear from the first day that La Movida was going to become a reef was Pablo Pérez-Mínguez. It was somewhat older than the rest, it was already thirty-something, and it also had a very important extra at that time: an apartment that it inherited in property on Monte Esquinza street in which almost every day, starting at six in the afternoon There was a party and things were happening , as in the Warhol Factory. There were filmed a multitude of video clips and Labyrinth of passions of Pedro Almodóvar. Joaquín, Pérez-Mínguez's brother, was excited to present the exhibition when he recalled the recently deceased Javier Furia of Radio Futura, one of his great friends and a frequent model in his photographs. His Alaskan cyberchromes and Pegamoides and Fabio McNamara speak for themselves.
Data of interest:
What: La Movida. Chronicle of an agitation. Where: Photo Colectonia Foundation (Passeig Picasso, 14. Barcelona). When: until February 16, 2020.
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