From Roots to Radio: Can Pop Culture Preserve Musical Heritage?
Boris Paillard, Elsa M'Bala, Tmnit Ghide
Tradition is often understood as something that must be protected from change. But what if change itself is what keeps culture alive? Around the world, artists are combining inherited musical traditions with contemporary production, social media, and pop-cultural aesthetics – not to replace cultural heritage, but to carry it into the present and the future. For many Indigenous communities in particular, music has become a vital medium of cultural self-determination: an expression of identity, political visibility, and self-representation on their own terms.
Boris Paillard, Elsa M’Bala, and moderator Tmnit Ghide discuss how music can become a vehicle for cultural empowerment. At the heart of the conversation is the question of how communities tell their own stories, translate musical traditions into new contexts, and find ways not only to preserve cultural knowledge, but to continually renegotiate it. Rather than focusing on the fear of losing tradition, the discussion explores its capacity to continually reinvent itself through pop culture.
Boris Paillard is a music journalist, DJ, and curator. Through his Berlin event series »African Beats & Pieces«, he shines a light on music scenes beyond the global mainstream, highlighting artists and cultural traditions that are often overlooked within Western pop discourse.
Working between Berlin and Yaoundé, sound artist Elsa M’Bala combines electronic music, poetry, and West African sonic traditions in a practice that is both political and poetic. Her work weaves together voices, rituals, digital technologies, and oral traditions to create an acoustic archive that re-examines questions of identity, colonial history, and cultural memory.
Tmnit Ghide is a sound artist, researcher, DJ, and cultural worker with Eritrean roots. Working across sound art, archival research, and community practice, she approaches sound as a socio-political archive of memory. Through projects such as ALVOZAY, she creates spaces in which music, diaspora, and cultural heritage can be experienced as living, collective practices.
