In the early 1970s, the South Bronx, a poor and predominantly African American neighborhood in New York, saw the emergence of a new urban counterculture composed of multiple creative elements such as rapping, breakdancing, graffiti, DJing and beatboxing.

The artist Jay Ramier and his collective BadBC were among the first representatives of this movement in France, inaugurating the Stalingrad wasteland in Paris in the early 1980s, an anti-museum known to have been at the epicenter of European hip hop. Ramier’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo retraces the origins of the movement which, as it circulates around the world, has become a site of creolization.
Maxwell Alexandre’s exhibition demonstrates this by referencing contemporary Brazilian hip hop in relation to the country’s current state of turbulence.