The death last Tuesday of the photographer Ouka Leele, an icon of the Madrid Movida for her images of colorful and surreal portraits, brings to light once again a controversial, mythologized and battered artistic and cultural movement that, more than forty years after its birth, persists around discussions and to nourish memories. “It was a group of beardless people who rebelled against their older brothers, those with long hair and trench coats, who ran ahead of the grays,” says photographer Miguel Trillo, born in Jimena de la Frontera (Cádiz) in 1953 and a portraitist by phone of the Youth of the streets and bars of the Movida. He was at what is believed to be the start date of the Movida, the February 9, 1980 concert at the Escuela de Caminos in Madrid, in tribute to the drummer of the tos group Canito, who died in a traffic accident on New Year’s Eve of the year 1979. However, before this concert, Ouka Leele, for example, had already presented her hairdressing series, portraits of friends, which she decorated with headgear made from dead objects or animals. Ouka Leele (Bárbara Allende) herself told this newspaper in an interview a year ago how she found out about the Movida: “We returned to Madrid at Christmas 1981 [de Barcelona] and photographer Carlos Serrano said to me, “You know what’s cool? La Movida… la Movida goes to someone’s house and then to another…”.
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Who knows that creative magma is the art collector José María Lafuente, owner of the Lafuente Archives, which houses important collections with works and documentation by Ouka Leele, Miguel Trillo and the late painters José Alfonso Morera Ortiz, El Hortelano, among others Year 2016, and Carlos Sánchez Pérez, Ceesepe, who died in 2018. The Lafuente Archives have narrated Madrid’s unique counterculture through exhibitions. “There are two key people: Ceesepe and the photographer Alberto García Alix, and from them branches of movements, magazines… They are also the two who entered the conventional market,” explains Lafuente. The journalist Elsa Fernández-Santos, an EL PAÍS collaborator and who has worked in the Lafuente Archives in the field of transition and counterculture, points out that “a new youth culture crystallized in them, whose speakers came from outside; They were interested in comics, fanzines and music…”. “I visited Ceesepe and with the material I found from the seventies an exhibition was set up in La Casa Encendida (Madrid) in 2019. For example, more than 90% of his comic production was intact,” adds Lafuente. The dairy entrepreneur has brought together the documentary and artistic collections of an unequally valued group. However, he points out that at the exhibitions organized, such as that of Ouka Leele a year ago at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, he has seen the great response of the public.
Another recent example was that of this year (closed March 20) by Carmen Alcaide at El Hortelano in Alcalá de Henares. Alcaide, who directs the Visual Arts classroom at the University of the City of Complutense, recalls that in 2019 he visited the workshop that El Hortelano had in Madrid, near the Retiro: “I was fascinated. There have been many works that go beyond the movida and in other formats such as prints, posters …”. The family owns most of their production, which is also distributed to friends and private collections.
Ouka Leele at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, 2014. Álvaro García
The link between El Hortelano and Alcalá dates back to 1975, when he was doing his military service there. On his days off, he went to the Rastro in Madrid, where he met Ceesepe, who had a comic booth. It was the beginning of their friendship. El Hortelano and Ouka Leele became a couple and the three moved into an apartment that became a meeting place for the Movida members. The three, together with García-Alix, founded the so-called Cascorro Factory, a horny Madrid version of Warhol’s The Factory, a place of inspiration and parties for the artist and his friends in New York.
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Miguel Trillo emphasizes that “what the Lafuente Archives does is not done by the institutions, for example the Reina Sofía Museum, which has tiptoed through this period in the restructuring of its spaces; There is also no Movida Museum”. However, the Ministry of Culture has recently decided to acquire the Archivo Lafuente, which will remain in the Reina Sofía perimeter once the purchase is complete. Added to this forgetfulness has been the occasional slur from various tribunes that have branded or subsidized those of the Movida as noble children, or that the PSOE used them because they saw them as a bait for votes (“Movida promoted by the City Council,” sang The Refrescos ) “We were young and aware that we lived in a situation of freedom, there was a desire to survive because there was a lot of violence: ETA, the Grapo, the extreme right … We wanted happiness and our bodies care about it asked to have fun without thinking about big projects,” he adds. Trillo, who remembers that in November 1983 the magazine La Luna de Madrid was born, “the official bulletin of the movida”.
This photographer sees in this contempt for the movida contempt for “something that wasn’t planned and that was hard to digest”. “Perhaps because there was no literary power. Of course, if we had a great writer, they would ask themselves, ‘And these children are the protagonists of the culture?’ Fernández-Santos adds: “There is still a long way to go before we can definitively evaluate them. They are artists who are discovered and seen differently. There is more prejudice among older people. Young people are infinitely more open-minded because they haven’t seen this movement, they see it in a cleaner way.” A fact confirmed by Lucía Casani, who curated the 2019 exhibition on Ceesepe at La Casa Encendida entitled Modern Vices: “It was a beautiful tribute that exposed his work to a younger generation that didn’t know him. This work has elements that would not stand up to the censorship of the politically correct today.”
From left: Nacho Canut, Ana Curra and Carlos Berlanga in the dressing rooms of the tribute concert for Canito at the Escuela de Caminos in Madri in February 1980. / JESÚS ORDOVÁS
This line is expressed by the gallery owner Pedro Maisterra, who in 2021 organized an exhibition on the Movida artist duo known as Costus, the painters Juan Carrero and Enrique Naya. “Now there’s a group of experts, from a generation, some of whom weren’t even born then, who demystify them. Many young people between the ages of 15 and 25 came to the exhibition because of the discovery, not because of the cliché. This period had artistic value in creative freedom and hybridization between disciplines, but was vilified with many clichés and prejudices. They were just a group of friends, a bunch of guys who have witnessed the explosion of youth culture.
Trillo, who has been photographing Southeast Asia’s youth for twenty years, points out that it is “an area where there is an icon, Almodóvar; I would say to the critics of the Movida to think of another movement that has this work and this name. La Movida updated a country in black and white with bright colors and that’s why they weren’t accepted. Almodóvar’s name is also pronounced by Maisterra: “This movement continues over time, thanks in large part to him. Not just because of the expected boom, but because it was the sponge that absorbed different people.”
The curator Salvador Nadales from the Reina Sofía Museum and expert on the work of the painter Guillermo Pérez Villalta (Tarifa, 1948) can speak about the treatment they received from the institutions. Nadales emphasizes that the market price of Movida’s works “remains quite affordable despite the genesis and importance that they have achieved due to their understanding of pop art”. They are sought-after authors from public institutions and large collections. In the case of Pérez Villalta, most of his production is located at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC) in Seville. “In the Reina Sofía we have some of his works, 26 of paintings and drawings”. He defines the art of the movida as “inconsequential and banal”, but makes it clear: “I do not say it pejoratively, I say it vindictively. They were unaware of this movement that would emerge later.”
El Hortelano, in the retrospective of his work at the Conde Duque (Madrid).Bernardo Pérez Tovar
Nadales points out that the reassessment of these movements is due to “the fact that they continue to arouse interest, as was the case with the exhibition in Villalta entitled Art as a Labyrinth in the Alcalá 31 room in Madrid, a retrospective that to see was in 2021. ” It attracted all types of audiences. Those who live in the group have not remained anchored in the past, they are evolving.”
This renewed interest in the Movida is not unique to the capital. One of their collectors is the artist Pablo Sycet, who made Gibraleón (Huelva, with 12,600 inhabitants) another point on the map of this movement. Sycet has compiled around 2,500 works from the 20th century, especially from the 1980s. He is judge and party. Sycet was a lyricist for the group Fangoria for 25 years (1990-2015) and author of some hits by Luz Casal such as Loca or Sentir.
When did the Movida end? The answer would be another long article, but Trillo puts the end in two fires, that of the Alcalá 20 nightclub, where 81 people died in December 1983, and that of the Rock Ola room, nerve center of the Movida. Next year. Some ashes from which this movement seems to rise again and again, as Carmen Alcaide says: “La Movida never ends”.
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