Tunis, 5 October 2023. On the night of 5 October 2023, Erkez HipHop, the flagship musical project of the DEBO collective, took over the stage at Yûka Gammarth as part of the 9th edition of Dream City, one of Tunisia’s most important multidisciplinary contemporary art festivals.
Presented as Erkez HipHop X Jloud, the concert brought together the explosive energy of Tunisian hip-hop and the popular musical universe surrounding mezoued, creating a performance rooted in Tunisian culture while firmly positioned within contemporary urban music.
It was not simply another Erkez concert.
It was Erkez entering the world of Dream City.
Erkez HipHop enters Dream City
Dream City, organised by L’Art Rue, is known for transforming Tunis and the Medina into a large-scale platform for contemporary artistic creation, bringing together music, dance, visual arts, performance and interdisciplinary projects.
The 2023 edition expanded beyond the historic spaces of the Medina, with two Dream Concerts taking place at Yûka in Gammarth.
The first featured the legendary Tunisian popular singer Hedi Habbouba.
The second was Erkez HipHop.
The official Dream City archive lists “Erkez Hip Hop by DEBO collective” among the programmes of the 2023 edition, with the concert scheduled for Thursday 5 October at 22:00 at Yûka Gammarth.
The festival’s own annual report explains the reason behind this move to Yûka: Dream City wanted to diversify its audiences and reach the wider Greater Tunis nightlife public.
For Erkez, this created a natural meeting point.
Dream City’s contemporary artistic environment met DEBO’s street culture.
A mini-revolution in sound
At the heart of Erkez HipHop is a deliberately unlikely combination.
Rap and mezoued.
Two musical worlds that, on the surface, seem difficult to reconcile.
Rap brings the language of the street, rhythm, flow, social commentary and contemporary production.
Mezoued brings one of Tunisia’s strongest popular musical traditions: its distinctive sound, rhythms and deep connection with everyday Tunisian life.
Erkez HipHop turns that apparent contradiction into the foundation of its sound.
The contemporary ticketing presentation of the Dream City concert described the project’s challenge precisely as bringing together rap and mezoued—calling the result an explosive mixture and a kind of musical revolution that breaks established models.
This is what makes Erkez different.
The project does not treat traditional Tunisian music as an ornament added to hip-hop.
It places the two worlds inside the same musical language.
Erkez X Jloud
The Yûka concert was promoted as Erkez HipHop X Jloud, continuing a musical relationship that had already appeared in DEBO’s programming.
Earlier in 2023, DEBO had presented Erkez HipHop invite Jloud at El Pacha in Hammamet, describing the project as a fusion between hip-hop and mezoued.
The Yûka performance therefore formed part of a broader exploration rather than being an isolated encounter.
Jloud represents a particularly strong connection to Tunisia’s popular musical culture, while Erkez approaches that same cultural material through rap, contemporary production and the aesthetics of the street.
Together, the project pushed the boundaries between popular music, urban culture and contemporary creation.
A different side of Dream City
The 2023 Dream City programme was remarkably diverse.
It included contemporary dance, installations, visual art, discussions, international projects and concerts ranging from Hedi Habbouba to Ghalia Benali, Sona Jobarteh, Al-Qasar and Alsarah & The Nubatones.
Within that landscape, Erkez HipHop occupied a distinctive position.
The group represented a Tunisia that is young, urban and constantly reinventing its relationship with tradition.
This was particularly significant because Dream City was not presenting Erkez simply as a hip-hop act.
The festival placed the project within a broader conversation about Tunisian contemporary culture.
Erkez became part of a programme asking a larger question:
What does Tunisian culture sound like today?
The answer was not necessarily traditional.
It could be a mezoued riff followed by a rap verse.
It could be a traditional rhythm transformed by electronic production.
It could be Tunisian Arabic spoken with the vocabulary and attitude of the street.
It could be loud, irreverent, political and danceable at the same time.
From the Medina to Gammarth
There is also something symbolic about the location.
Dream City is historically associated with the Medina of Tunis, using its streets, architecture and public spaces as part of the artistic experience.
For its Dream Concerts, however, the festival deliberately moved outside the Medina and into Gammarth.
The annual report describes this as an effort to reach new audiences and connect with the nightlife public of Greater Tunis.
Erkez was therefore performing at the intersection of two worlds:
the cultural memory of Tunis and the contemporary nightlife of the capital.
And that is exactly where the group’s music lives.
A stage built for Erkez
The production itself was handled at a professional festival level.
SYBEL Event Company lists Erkez Hiphop Dream City among its festival productions, identifying Art Rue as the announcer and producer, with SYBEL responsible for the technical production.
The Erkez technical rider for Dream City also illustrates the scale of the performance setup, calling for a substantial stage configuration, dedicated stage management, FOH engineering and advance preparation for lighting.
This matters because Erkez was no longer operating simply as a club act.
The project had developed into a full-scale live production capable of moving between clubs, festivals, theatres and major international stages.
A key moment in the 2023 Erkez journey
The Yûka performance came during an exceptional period for Erkez HipHop.
In 2023, the project was appearing on increasingly important stages.
The group performed at the Festival International de Carthage in August, appeared at the El Jem World Music Festival, and only two days after Dream City, Erkez would perform at L’Olympia Paris as part of One Night in Tunisia.
That sequence tells an important story.
Carthage.
El Jem.
Dream City.
Different audiences. Different contexts. Different stages.
But the same musical identity.
The group’s ability to move between these environments demonstrates that Erkez HipHop is not confined to a single definition of what Tunisian music should be.
Breaking the rules
The importance of the Dream City concert lies ultimately in the contradiction at its centre.
Erkez HipHop is built around music that was never supposed to fit neatly together.
Rap and mezoued.
Tradition and street culture.
Local identity and international ambition.
Old instruments and modern production.
The project does not attempt to resolve these contradictions.
It uses them.
That is where the energy comes from.
At Yûka, within one of Tunisia’s most important contemporary arts festivals, Erkez HipHop X Jloud transformed those contradictions into a live performance.
A performance where Tunisian popular culture was not presented as a museum piece, but as something alive—something that can evolve, collide with hip-hop, enter a nightclub, occupy a contemporary-art festival and travel internationally.
Dream City 2023
For Erkez HipHop, the Dream City 2023 performance was therefore more than a concert date.
It was a statement of position.
The DEBO collective’s project had moved from the underground and street culture of Tunis into increasingly visible national and international spaces without abandoning the musical language that made it unique.
At Yûka, Erkez did exactly what it has always aimed to do:
take Tunisian culture, break the rules around it, and rebuild it as contemporary hip-hop.
And for one night at Dream City, rap met mezoued, DEBO met Dream City, and the streets of Tunis met the contemporary stage.
Erkez HipHop X Jloud — Dream City 2023.
Yûka Gammarth, 5 October 2023.
A night where the boundaries between tradition and hip-hop became impossible to see.
