186 pages Edited by Driss Dendoune Foreword by Manu Key Designed by Nicolas Charavet 27,8 x 22 cm Language: French Hardback Publisher: mgh! NEXT Limited edition of 100 copies with Beyond the Streets Paris foil stamp 2026
Special edition produced for the Beyond the Streets Paris exhibition at Grande Halle de la Villette. Full publication autumn 2026.
"I'm still looking for the t-shirts we put out on Métèque and Mat: the one with the lupara, the one with Captain America that was called 'Captain Americano', the one with the checkerboard... Navy t-shirt with the checkerboard printed in white and green!..." — Akhénaton (IAM), June 2026
Driss Dendoune discovered rap at a very young age, in an environment where music circulated hand to hand. From this lived proximity emerges an attentive gaze toward the material forms that accompany culture — what objects carry, what they say, what they transmit.
In hip-hop, the t-shirt functions as a primary medium: short runs, artisanal printing, local distribution. Unlike rock merchandising, these pieces emerged outside institutional circuits and far from mass production logics. They circulate before the labels, before the storefronts. Their rarity is structural, linked to a scene that was still fluid and decentralized — particularly in French rap from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.
Designed for immediate use, these objects gradually acquire an archival function. The t-shirts presented here, from Driss Dendoune's personal collection, are worn, faded, kept — the first archives of a culture that built its visibility outside dominant frameworks. Graphics, slogans, and visual references form a fragile yet essential material memory. This book tells the story of these objects, and through them, a history of transmission, of preservation, of a scene that writes itself before anyone knew it mattered.
