Articulating Punk in an Industrial City: Turin and the Collettivo Punx Anarchici in the early 1980s

In this paper I want to show how subcultural research matters – especially when confronting a specific conjuncture such as ‘popular music as resistance in industrial cities in crisis.’ Interpreting the relation among subcultures, spatialities and economic crisis as an articulation, I will examine the Collettivo Punx Anarchici (Anarchist Punk Collective), active in Turin (Italy) in the early 1980s. I am interested in revealing how the Collettivo articulated spatial decay and social unrest. Bands such as Contrazione, Declino and Negazione (among others) created original, non-profit and self-organized forms of subcultural production.Through the analysis of the Collettivo and their embedment into Turin’s spatial and social context, I delegitimize forms of reductionism and achieve a more nuanced understanding of possible activities of underground resistance in the context of the contemporary city.