Magazine

From Seoul to San Juan, hyperlocal sounds are rewriting the rules of global pop, proving that the more rooted the music, the wider it can travel. Yet, singeli, Tanzania’s blistering, homegrown electronic rush, remains largely confined to East Africa and niche European dance floors. In an age that supposedly rewards authenticity and locality, why hasn’t one of the continent’s most radical genres crossed over?

On a full-moon night in Jamaica, Nyabinghi, one of the most ancient Rastafari ceremonial practices, unfolds as a living ritual in which drums, chants, and fire gather bodies into a shared field of clarity. “Tonight we a chant,” a young Rasta tells German Iraki, author of the book ‘Get Nuff Nuff Data’. “We a do the opposite of what the evil man a do. We use the moon for prosperity and to fight evil spells.” Nyabinghi uses rhythm to cleanse; it is a kind of spiritual technology, transforming communal presence into a practice of grounding, healing, and collective awareness.

Beginning with a theatre piece about a man in love with a silicone sex doll, Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (SPBH, 2025), explores attachment without reciprocity and the material conditions of care and projection. Turning to animegao kigurumi, and through a dialogue with Oshiruko Chan, a forever seventeen-year-old fictional character with large blue eyes and blonde hair, Simon(e) explores how masks and garments shape behaviour rather than express identity, positioning age as a structuring fiction and the self as an architectural phenomenon.

From the sweat-drenched chill-out rooms of early-90s Brixton to the algorithmic sprawl of contemporary ambient rave: how a music born to hold bodies through altered states became a survival grammar for the dissociative drift of digital capitalism in a world that never quite comes down.

In Chengdu, queer communities navigate tightening control and fading digital openness, reshaping where and how connection can exist in China. Public celebration recedes, nightlife moderates itself, and intimacy slips into coded networks and overlooked daytime spaces. Through Xinke Lee’s returning gaze, nightlife, public encounters, and cruising grounds reveal a fundamental reckoning: an ongoing meditation on adaptation and loss, and a community that survives through floating identities.

Dimes Square resists definition, operating as a feedback loop of images, discourse and affect. Through Honor Levy’s account, in dialogue with Nell Whittaker, it emerges as a collective rehearsal where irony hardens into structure and the internet becomes lived form, raising questions of authorship, innocence and the desire to exist as a vessel within history.

Masbate, one of the largest islands in the Philippine archipelago, revolves around cattle. Bulls, cows and pasture define its culture; ranches span the land, and labour has shaped a landscape marked by centuries of hoofprints. Lassoing, cattle wrestling and horse breaking are not just survival skills, but the basis of a singular public ritual: Southeast Asia’s largest rodeo.

At the intersection of cosplay and concealment, animegao kigurumi reveals how identity shifts through embodiment. By fully erasing the visible self, the practice creates space for behavioral freedom and altered social dynamics. Confidence, gentleness, and play emerge through the mask, showing how identity is shaped in interaction rather than anchored to personal history.

Hyperlocal presents a short film directed by Alain Parroni, an intimate story created inside the Rebibbia Penitentiary Complex.

Through digital explorations of Rome’s suburban geography and the direct experiences and words of the inmates who collaborated with Hyperlocal, the film explores how this hidden neighborhood, its inhabitants, and their lives are perceived from within its walls. It is a story about those who are unseen, living in a world with different rules.

“Caesar Must Die” is a 2012 movie by Taviani Brothers, inspired by the Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The directors had seen the Rebibbia ensemble at work and were convinced of its cinematic potential but needed a story with universal resonance. Conspiracy, betrayal, guilt, leadership, and the corruption of power—all central themes in Shakespeare’s tragedy—echoed the actors’ own lives and the paths that had led them to prison.

The prison is a crucial passage for those who end up inside it. Fuori, the film by Mario Martone, shot in prison and based on Goliarda Sapienza’s novel The University of Rebibbia, portrays the spaces of Rebibbia as a labyrinth where fragmented space and disoriented senses contribute to “regressing you to childhood,” as Goliarda writes, and which can suddenly become a kind of home, strangely similar to the outside world.

Among gardens and walls unfolds the tragic story of Germana Stefanini, a guard executed by three self-styled revolutionaries during a so-called “proletarian trial,” whose name was later given to the Female Section of Rebibbia prison.

“Camera Oscura” was a photographic project by Tano D’Amico occurred in Rebibbia. One of the few that let the detainee shoot their own photos. It was a way to overturn photography’s usual role from an instrument of control and transform it into a space of shared freedom, and above all, a way to bridge, or at least narrow, the distance from the outside. As some participants wrote years later: “Since we do not wish anyone to have to come and visit us here, we prefer to reach you ourselves through our images.”

How does a wedding happen in prison? Isabella De Silvestro tells the story of Tiziana, a woman who attended two weddings, one as a guest and the other as the bride, during the 1980s, when they were all political prisoners in Rebibbia.

In early ’90s Rebibbia, three lives crossed: Princesa (Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque), a trans woman from Brazil; Giovanni, a Sardinian lifer; and Maurizio, ex-Brigate Rosse. Their secret letters became the novel Princesa, an act of liberation that lingers on her experiences of desire, sex, and self, while suggesting a historical passing from political struggle to identity struggle.

Pope Francis died in prison. He entered Rebibbia, fell into a coma, and died. It gave meaning to his mission. For the first time in history, a pontiff opened a Holy Door inside a penitentiary. Francis himself said that on that occasion, for one day, Rebibbia became a basilica: “I opened the first Holy Door at Christmas in St Peter’s, but I wanted the second Holy Door to be here, in a prison. I wanted each of us here, inside and outside, to have the chance to fling open the doors of our hearts and understand that hope does not disappoint.”

Sergio Lenci was the architect of the New Rebibbia Penitentiary Complex. A visionary modernist, attentive to social issues and to the living conditions of inmates, he became the victim of an attempted assassination by a group of Brigatisti in the 1970s. From that day and for the rest of his life, Sergio devoted himself to understanding the reasons behind the attack. The story of the new Rebibbia begins in this way: in armed struggle, in the internal conflict within the architectural instrument, and in reflection on the idea of forgiveness.

Check this excerpt: Prison is a country most people never come to know. You don’t set out for it; you end up there, often without quite realising how. No one chooses it, but who lives in it? These are the stories of Rebibbia. The stories of 17 people—a small group who resemble, however, the many who inhabit all these countries where you end up without ever wanting to.

Rebibbia is a “neighborhood that doesn’t exist”: a prison suspended between maps and walls, visibility and invisibility. Hyperlocal explores the shared ground between the district and its prison, two mirrored worlds that surface only in brief flashes of attention before returning to silence, revealing stories, voices, and reflections on justice, time, and coexistence—told directly by inmates and through original narratives that position Rebibbia Prison itself as a central subject.

In the early 1990s, as Poland emerged from Soviet influence and rebuilt after the fall of communism, a new subculture began to take shape in the urban blocks of working-class neighbourhoods. Known as blokersi or “kids from the block,” these youth, often from economically marginalised families, embraced hip-hop culture as a means to express their post-communist identity. They used graffiti, skateboarding, and rap music to critique the disillusionment of the era, with southern Warsaw districts like Mokotów and Ursynów becoming the epicentres of this cultural movement. It was here that Polish hip-hop was born, giving rise to influential crews like ZIP Skład, Molesta, and Hemp Gru, marking the start of a unique social and musical revolution in the country.