La Movida. Spagna 1980-1990

After 40 years of military dictatorship and with the end of censorship, the 1980s and 1990s saw the beginning of a period of construction of the new democratic Spain, which left behind a dark legacy to make its way in the West. While the previous generations shape a new political framework, the younger ones focus on the enjoyment of the new regime of freedom, and the Movida becomes the excessive image of this new rising Spain: young, wild, irreverent, colourful, hedonistic and free.

Songs and photographs, along with cinema, were the perfect correlate of the Spanish political change of the 1980s. But Miguel Trillo, instead of sharing his generation's fascination for the new musical idols, stopped to look at the audience that made the musicians stars of mass culture. In his photos, the camera has its back to the stage and focuses on the concert-goers. And he does not do so furtively, like the reporter or researcher who wants to capture an evanescent moment: the protagonists in Trillo's photographs are aware that the camera will fix them forever in time, and they strive to show who they are as best they can.

These images testify to the emergence of a new culture in which we are now immersed, in which sound and image have replaced the word as the central element.

La movida. Spagna 1980-1990 is the first exhibition in a series organised by the Spanish Embassy in Italy, which aims to present this fundamental period in Spain's recent history through the generation of photographers that emerged in those years.

MIGUEL TRILLO (Jimena de la Frontera, Cádiz 1953)
A graduate in Imagen and Lingüística Hispánica, he has been portraying young people in a musical context since the 1970s. In the 1980s he focused on the non-famous protagonists of the Movida Madrileña and began presenting his photographs in art galleries, as well as anonymously editing the six issues of the fanzine Rockocó (1980-1984), which today form part of the collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
In the early 1990s, he produced a portrait of Spanish youth in six small towns, which he exhibited at the Moriarty Gallery (Madrid, 1992) under the title Souvenirs, and published a set of tourist postcards as a catalogue. Between 1993 and 2004 he developed the series Geografía Moderna, a journey across the linguistic or territorial borders of the Iberian Peninsula, whose portraits were published as postage stamps.
His international journey began in 1999 with the Habaneras series, a two-year work on transvestites in Cuba. The project Afluencias. East Coast, West Coast, shows the similarities between the underground aesthetics of the United States, Vietnam and Morocco. He is currently working on two series: Asiatown, about youth culture in Asian megacities, and Ficciones, a journey into the world of manga, otaku and cosplay.
His work has been exhibited in some of the world's leading centres of photography; in 2009, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville and the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid jointly organised his first retrospective, Identidades. In 2014 he exhibited Afluencias at the Tabacalera in Madrid and in 2017 the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo in Madrid reproduced what were his first two exhibitions. In 2019 he exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles.

He received the Kaulak Prize for Photography from the Madrid City Council (2009) and the Prize for Culture in the photography category from the Community of Madrid (2018).