Since 2021, Hyperlocal has been exploring neighbourhoods and their cultural scenes. Over four years of research, magazines, and live events, we have held three editions of the eponymous Festival and showcased dozens of international neighbourhoods.

This year, Hyperlocal has been invited to the 24th International Exhibition at Triennale Milano with an abridged edition of its magazine—an editorial installation that explores a different cultural scene and its neighbourhood of reference on a two-month rotation until November.

But you may ask: what is Hyperlocal?

Scenes and Neighbourhoods

Hyperlocal is an editorial platform that explores the relationships between cultural scenes and their neighbourhoods. We focus on what may seem like minimal, local spaces: the neighbourhood as the city’s elementary unit, and the scene as a shared, small-scale laboratory of lifestyles.

A neighbourhood is the simplest form of social space, where communities take shape by sharing particular images of the city and, in turn, specific values. There are diasporic neighbourhoods, elite neighbourhoods, garden neighbourhoods, and port districts—each fostering social recognition codes rooted in distinct identities.

A scene is the most cohesive expression of this recognition: an umbrella term encompassing social segments and cultural free zones where ideas of cultural hegemony are consolidated, aesthetic and communicative codes are created, and unconventional lifestyles are practised.

Local Spaces as Global Attractors

Hyperlocal reports on cultural and local phenomena by analysing the favourable environmental conditions that foster the development of these scenes.

While the social networks we call scenes certainly have a clear place of origin, the cultural codes they produce draw from global cultural, communicative, and reputational systems. As a result, a scene may emerge in one location yet extend its networks thousands of kilometres away, sometimes even becoming a mass phenomenon—hence, they are hyperlocal.

In this sense, scenes and neighbourhoods serve as pivotal spaces: attractors where mainstream culture differentiates its aesthetic and ethical expressions. This is why global and local spaces are inherently contradictory. Each follows its own logic: one imposes generalities, while the other expresses distinct identities.

Hyperlocal focuses on these local variations and discontinuities, which act as indicators of social transformation and hint at diverging cultural trajectories.

For us, semiotics is, above all, a great form of topology.

The Platform

Hyperlocal’s editorial platform operates as a decentralised network. We collaborate with local communities, engaging writers, editors, photographers, artists, and professionals who have firsthand experience within these communities. This approach allows us to craft authentic narratives, rooted in local networks, their specific contexts, and representations—by involving those who genuinely care.

Each aspect of our content is co-curated with guest editors, local curators, and selectors. They are responsible for building a network of local and international contributors connected to the scene and its neighbourhood, engaging relevant brands, writers, artists, and local communities.

Through this collaborative process, we build an interdisciplinary narrative that explores each scene’s lifestyles and expressive codes, capturing their visions and values, and how they resonate globally from a local perspective.

Hyperlocal is a platform dedicated to showcasing and narrating the stories of cultural scenes and their neighbourhoods. It is a multilingual, poster-based magazine displayed within the communities it covers. It is a series of live events bringing artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, and designers to the forefront of their scenes. It is a public programme of talks exploring methods of cultural reproduction at a local level. It is a festival that explores, tells the stories of, and bridges scenes and neighbourhoods worldwide.

Hyperlocal Platform at the 24^th International Exhibition of Triennale Milano

Hyperlocal is invited to the 24^th International Exhibition at Triennale Milano.

Titled Inequalities, the exhibition looks at the human condition, considering the growing inequalities around the world, gathering proposal and ideas that looks at differences as possible resources to design and think about other forms of community.

The perspective that Hyperlocal brings centres on the cultural need for identity recognition.

The three neighbourhood scenes presented at Triennale exemplify cultural ecosystems rooted in grassroots stories and connected to global communities. These are niches of emerging identities—spaces where new lifestyles and aesthetic forms are conceived and practised as expressions of self-determination and as responses to outdated cultural codes.

The scenes and neighbourhoods presented in the 24^th International Exhibition, from May to November 2025, exemplify hyperlocal dynamics: shared values that call for new forms of identity, and cultural codes that emerge locally and spread globally.

→ May 2025 – Victoria Island, Lagos (Nigeria) Home to the alté scene—a network of creatives united by a shared drive for radical self-expression across music, fashion, and visual culture. Distancing itself from the dominant cultural norms surrounding Nigerian identity, alté creates safe spaces for experimentation and authenticity beyond societal barriers, including homofobia, ageism, and classism.

→ July 2025 – Umberto I, La Spezia (Italy) This neighbourhood hosts one of Europe’s largest Dominican communities, formed in the 1990s through a female-led diaspora. Rooted around Piazza Brin in the Umberto I district, the community gave rise to Kitipo—mobile car sound systems originally developed in New York’s Dominican enclaves (Washington Heights/Inwood). Here, musicólogos (Dominican DJs) compete for the loudest, cleanest sound, playing dembow, merengue, and bachata.

→ September 2025 – Buahbatu, Bandung (Indonesia) A site of global historical importance, having hosted the Bandung Conference that launched the post-colonial movement. With a legacy of student protests and anti-authoritarian uprisings, Bandung remains a city of contrasts. The Buahbatu district embodies Indonesia’s stark social divides and serves as a hub for DIY youth cultures. Here, loud genres like metal and hardcore have become tools of resistance, giving voice to inequality and enabling collective dissent.

Acknowledging that geographical divides shape lived experiences on various levels, we strive to look beyond hegemonic biases and give space to narrators whose stories generate knowledge that questions and challenges cultural stereotyping.