Lil Misho & Olivia Mendez (Co-Creation-Residenz Detroit / Berlin)
Musicboard Berlin, in collaboration with the Detroit-Berlin Connection and ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics, awards a »Co-Creation Residency« to one solo electronic musician based in Berlin and one based in Detroit. As part of the residency, the two artists jointly develop a new work – first during the Berlin-based artist’s residency in Detroit, followed by the international artist’s residency in Berlin. The results of their collaboration will be presented live for the first time at the Pop-Kultur Festival, the festival of Musicboard Berlin. The co-creation residency fosters artistic exchange and transcontinental collaboration.
Lil Misho is the electronic music project of artist Christopher Yepez, an Anishinaabe and Xicano producer and interdisciplinary artist. His music combines techno, house, ghettotech, and experimental club music with a hybrid sonic language that brings together electronic and organic elements. These include Pow Wow drums, Jingle Dress cones, rattles, shakers, and field recordings captured from natural environments such as water, wind, and fire.
His artistic approach is shaped by the connection between Southwest Detroit and Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation), where Anishinaabe and Xicano perspectives play a central role. The exchange between different cultural contexts opens a space between past, present, and future.
Before developing his electronic project, Yepez worked under the name Sacramento Knoxx in hip-hop and multimedia storytelling. This work encompassed rap, live beat-making, film projections, and community-based projects, all of which continue to inform his sound today.
Lil Misho understands his work not simply as performance, but as a collective experience that opens up new possibilities for imagining the future. In his current practice, he brings together Detroit’s electronic music traditions and Indigenous Futurism, creating sonic worlds that transcend cultural and geographical boundaries.
To hear Olivia Mendez DJ is to encounter an artist who understands rhythm not merely as a framework, but as a form of storytelling. Shaped by the Senegalese drumming she danced to as a child, Olivia Mendez developed an early fascination with percussive music. That fascination continues to inform her work today. Her sets are driven by rhythm and movement, combining precisely crafted grooves with a rich variety of textures, samples, and atmospheric details.
A passionate record collector and digger, she spends countless hours searching through record shops for overlooked recordings, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary and avant-garde approaches. The result is a style of DJing that feels both playful and purposeful: fast-moving, energetic, and propulsive, yet always guided by a keen sense of dynamics and atmosphere.
Olivia Mendez also works as a music journalist, artist, and organiser, perspectives that are reflected in the breadth of her musical selections. Through KONVENT, the FLINTA*-focused collective she founded, she is additionally committed to creating queer and feminist spaces within club culture.
