The Galician audio/visual fields have been key areas of cultural deperipheralization and means of reimagining Galicianess on the global map in recent years. From a historical point of view, the contemporary developments in audio/visual production in Galicia need to be understood within the general context of two fundamental phenomena that have reshaped the traditional concepts of nation and culture in the last few decades: one at the level of the reconfiguration of the nation state—the consequences of the ongoing process of political devolution and autonomous decentralization initiated since the 1978 Spanish constitution; and the other at the transnational level—the effects of political, economic, technological, and cultural globalization in local environments. Together they have redrawn a new cultural map that we could call postnational. Against this complex and evolving backdrop, we can distinguish several stages in the development of modern Galician audio/visual culture.

The 1980s are a foundational period for Galician audio/visual production, part of a larger project of nation (re)building which occurred in the context of the general “reconversion” crisis, primarily an economic and industrial process, but profoundly intertwined with the political and sociocultural transition of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These changes should be seen in relation to the beginning of the deperipheralization of Galician culture in broader terms (and particularly in the areas of music, media, literature, fashion, and the visual arts) and its opening to the world at large. Some major collective undertakings represented the concerted launch of a new and modern culture in dialogue with national and international trends, including new cultural “brands” such as the Movida galega, Cinegalicia, Galician Celtic music, and the Atlántica visual arts movement, which acquired momentum and wide projection throughout the 1980s with diverse degrees of institutional support. These projects are characterized by a very high degree of intermediality, which could be synthesized in the pioneering avant-garde multidisciplinary work of Rompente, and cut across the conventional categories of high and low, local and global, tradition and modernity, and the areas of music, literature, and image. The work of Siniestro Total and Os Resentidos, which represent two opposing poles of the Galician Movida rock of the 1980s, are deeply intertwined.