English Brand New Book. Europunk serves as the catalog for the exhibition curated by the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, from January 20, 2011 to March 20, 2011, and in Geneva in Spring 2011 Punk was not solely a musical movement; it was about sound, but also about looks and images, whose means and uses it was redefining. From its beginning in the mid-1970s, it established a model for an alternative practice of art, which still retains its efficacy more than thirty years later. The exhibition Europunk wishes to focus on the visual culture of Punk in Europe in the second half of the 1970s. Rather than telling a well rehearsed history that follows the path of musical influences (New York - 1974; London - 1976; Continental Europe the US West Coast - 1977/82), it will start with the simultaneous appearance of an alternative way of creating and using images in England and France around 1975-76, in the hands of graphic designers, illustrators, image makers and agitators such as Jamie Reid, Malcolm McLaren or Bazooka (a team consisting of Olivia Clavel, Kiki Picasso, Loulou Picasso, Ti-5 Dur and Bernard Vidal). It will then proceed to the circulation of images and methods all over Europe, before the advent of New-Wave and the transfer into high-culture, with emphasis on local scenes as lively as Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Geneva, London, Manchester, Milano, Paris, Pordenone, Zurich, etc. It will gather for the first time a vast array of visual material, some of it well known, some under-recognized: fanzines, posters, clothes, paintings, objects, record covers, films. By stressing the incredible quality and vitality of these alternative artistic productions, it will show how the visual subculture of Punk embodied both a desire for a tabula rasa and a cultural renewal that were synonymous with a new energy and a principle of maximized creative freedom that has had deep political bearings and far-reaching artistic and sociological effect
