The Magnetic Terrace 2023: ¡Alucina, vecina!

The Magnetic Terrace is back for a new edition with the slogan ¡Alucina, vecina!. Perhaps best rendered as a call to local residents to come and join in the fun, it’s also an ode to the subcultures, sounds and voices of the fringes, and to music and movies as drivers of collective community-building initiatives.

A love letter to neighbourhoods, an invitation for residents to spend time together, to dance and celebrate in Madrid during the months of July and August.

Eight Friday music sessions and eight Saturday movie screenings aspire to sweep away the clichés typically associated with the suburbs and make room for film directors and musicians who have forged new narratives.

On eight Friday evenings, The Magnetic Terrace will host concerts by artists who proclaim their roots and strive to create community through music and dance. Opening this year’s edition is Dinamarca, the Chilean DJ and producer now resident in Sweden whose mixture of futuristic sounds with Latin rhythms and flow has revolutionised dance floors and turned him into an icon of club music connected to local scenes. Simona, a Barcelona-based Argentinian artist, debunks stereotypes with lyrics that share her experience as an immigrant in Spain. From Brazil comes DJ Cashu, a member of the Mamba Negra collective that not only operates as platform for music but also defends female representation and sexual and gender freedom. Inspired by the UK sound of the early 1990s, the Andalucian artist Dalila transports us to the heart and hedonistic spirit of raves, with a performance steeped in nostalgia. July closes with a concert by the Barcelona artist 80%BAUL, whose mixture of post punk, new wave, synth-pop, EBM, Italo and new beat is living proof that the subcultures are still alive and kicking.

The first concert in August is courtesy of Cakes Da Killa, the American rapper who was responsible, along with artists like Mykki Blanco and Zebra Katz, for the explosion of queer rap on the New York LGBT scene. He brings ballroom culture to The Magnetic Terrace with a performance that fuses powerful hip-hop and house rhythms. The concert by Ideograma is influenced by Detroit techno and the history of the Malasaña neighbourhood, cradle of Madrid’s club culture. To close the concert programme we have the DJ and producer Asmara, a favourite at LA clubs, member of the Nguzunguzu collective and the executive producer of the latest album from Kelela.

The open-air cinema sessions on Saturday evenings offer a new look at fringe neighbourhoods through the eyes of the women featured in eight films, such as Mi vida loca (My Crazy Life) by Allison Anders about girl gangs (cholas) in Echo Park; the teenagers who live in the rough neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris, in Girlhood by Céline Sciamma; and to the rhythm of reggaeton in the ‘anti-postcard’ version of Valparaíso depicted in Ema, by Pablo Larraín. What Have I Done to Deserve This? by Pedro Almodóvar and Greener Grass by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe portray two very different housewives who share the fact of being prisoners in their home, one in the Concepción neighbourhood of Madrid and the other in well-to-do and somewhat surreal US suburbia. Neighbouring Sounds by Kleber Mendonça Filho exposes the hidden violent realities of affluent circles in the city of Recife, while Selfie by Agostino Ferrente interrogates the romanticisation of crime in a Naples neighbourhood. Last but certainly not least, the programme ends with Style Wars, the legendary documentary about graffiti and the explosion of the hip-hop scene on New York’s streets and subway at the beginning of the 1980s.