In our urban society everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society stronger also make it vulnerable.”
(Threads, British Television drama produced by the BBC, 1984)
Raise the Curtain is a patchwork of visual expressions related to music where hip-hop, punk, blues, hardcore, salsa, electro and other avant-garde forms of popular urban cultures reverberate. The title puts emphasis on the cloth that unveils the performer to its audience. Cloths, networks, dress codes serve as a backdrop that unites sound and image, identity and anonymity, culture and politics. As the seemingly ungraspable essence of sound meanders within the wrap and the weft of the exhibition, its unfurled fabric resists to the apolitical hegemony of the spectacle.
In parallel with the works, Raise the Curtain includes a selection of flyers, videos, fanzines, pictures and records of specific underground music movements; mostly international d.i.y hardcore punk from the 80´s up until recent times. On the margins of commercial networks and against all odds, this revolted attitude of do it yourself culture spread over Latin America, the United States, Western and Eastern Europe as well as Asia or the Middle East and resonated as a sound board of social unrest. These collections expose a topography of fragments where the memories of shows, songs and places are material proofs of collective forms of struggles. For that reason, LiMac exposes these archives as the testimony of a multicultural reality made of gaps, bridges, noises, silences where the white neutrality of the exhibition space clashes with such forms of manifestation.
Artist: Dennis Adams, Christian Bagnat, Geta Brătescu, Johanna Calle, Phil Collins, Tony Conrad, William Cordova, Alice Creischer, Moyra Davey, Eugenio Espinoza, Jon Mikel Euba, Sandra Gamarra, Raúl García Pereira, Carmela García, Iñaki Garmendia, Jutta Koether, Amilcar Llontop, Colectivo Bestiario / Alfredo Márquez, Daniel Paris-Clavel y Elvira Poxon.