Nearly 50 years on from our own April revolution, Batalha offers a revealing perspective on our neighbour country’s transition to democracy. An accelerated and complex period of hope and cultural revolution, differing from Portugal not only on a political and social level, but also in terms of artistic production. In 1981, the hit song “Enamorado de la moda juvenil” (In Love with Youth Fashion), by the band Radio Futura, proclaimed “el futuro ya está aquí” (the future is here), capturing that feeling of freedom that Spanish society was beginning to experience at the end of the dictatorship.

Music, fashion, new forms of expression even unto sexuality, creativity and transgression. Drugs, excess, disillusion and death. For a period of just over ten years, a new generation traversed all this euphoria, entering a state of ecstasy both in La Movida madrileña and all over Spain.

In the field of Cinema, directors such as Almodovar, Saura, Eloy de la Iglesia and the Quinqui delinquency cinema movement portrayed the margins of society, together with the country’s first feminist film director Josefina Molina and the new expressions of queer and trans cinema, previously prohibited by Franquismo.

This energy of unstoppable renewal which seemed enduring and unyielding, ended up corrupted by wounds yet to be healed.

Curated by Guilherme Blanc and Virginia Pablos