An exhibition that reviews the scene of ‘punk’ and ‘hardcore’ in Valencia since the Transition
The noise of rage of Valencian punk and hardcore comes to an exhibition that has collected the main materials of a musical and cultural scene linked to anarchism and self-managed social centers. The exhibition, which will be installed in the library of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia between November 30th and January 15th, 2021, arises as a complement to another collective project that in book form will present the punk and hardcore that has sounded in Valencia since the late 70s to almost the present. The panels review, with texts and graphic material, the bands, sounds, lyrics and aesthetics, as well as the use of music as an instrument of political and social movements.
Both musical trends and cultural expressions were born in a historical, political and social context of economic crisis, social control, disenchantment and precariousness. For its own protagonists, punk is not only a musical trend but an attitude towards the system in which they survive and develop their creativity. Do it yourself is an inseparable part of the genesis of the musical movement itself with the attitude of bands that promoted self-management as a way of channeling their imagination and their political message.
The exhibition briefly reviews the emergence of punk in Britain and the United States, and explains how its scream, rage and provocation spread and spread to hundreds of young people around the world and, especially, to the city of Turia. Thus, the groups born in Valencia appear, grouped by decades, which emerge and fill with distortion and electric shocks the rehearsal rooms, gambling dens, squats, discos and parties around the cap i casal. In addition, several panels are dedicated to free radios, fanzines, and alternative distributors, authentic social networks of a time when the closest thing to a cell phone were telephone booths.
The exhibition also includes a selection of records and demos of the bands featured and some bibliographical references on the subject. The bands featured in this exhibition not only write proclamations or sound pamphlets, their lyrics also speak of feelings, emotions and personal experiences. They are people of diverse aesthetics who may or may not have been organizing movements, promoting actions and spreading messages with a political objective. Involved or not, nihilistic or politicized, playful or combative, all these thousands of young people have been united by the right to protest. Those who make music from a politicized environment have linked it to self-management, assembly and street action from horizontal and anti-authoritarian assumptions.