Two new voices join Muziekpublique’s residency programme : Shak Shakito and Zinne Kabar

There’s something quietly radical about giving artists time. Not a deadline, not a showcase slot, not a three-minute pitch window, but genuine, unhurried time to dig deeper into what they’re making and why. That’s been the guiding principle behind Muziekpublique’s residency programme since it launched, and four editions in, the results speak for themselves. Past residents have gone on to build durable careers on Belgian stages and beyond. This year, two new projects join that lineage: Shak Shakito, a Congolese guitarist and composer whose music carries the rhythms of the Kasaï and the Equateur deep in its grain, and Zinne Kabar, a Brussels-based collective breathing new life into the ancient tradition of Réunion’s maloya.

A track record worth noting

Before we get to the newcomers, it’s worth pausing to remember what this programme has already made possible. Past residents, L’Évidence des Nuages, Melisa Galluzzo, Alfaia, Peixe e Limão, have gone on to carve out real, durable careers in world music, their names still circulating in conversations about what’s happening on Belgian stages and beyond. Muziekpublique doesn’t run a residency for the optics. It runs one because it believes, with some conviction, that emerging traditional musics deserve more than a platform, they deserve the conditions in which something genuinely new can take shape.

Shak Shakito: Congo at his fingertips

Shamba Benoit Olela, known professionally as Shak Shakito, arrived at music through a side door. Born in Lodja, in the heart of Kasaï Oriental, he trained as a painter at the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa before a neighbour’s guitar changed the trajectory of his life entirely. He set down his brushes, studied music at the Institut National des Arts, and graduated in 2007. A year later, he launched his professional career at the Festival Cœur d’Afrique.

What makes Shak Shakito’s work so absorbing is the constant, living dialogue he maintains between tradition and the contemporary. His compositions weave together the rhythms of eastern and equatorial Congo, basongye, baluba, ana-mongo, with threads of rock, reggae and funk, while his lyrics, sung in kitetela and lingala, render everyday Kinshasa life with a disarming directness. Two albums (Fausse Note, 2011; Ngelo, 2017) and a standout single (“MotO Pamba”, 2019) have already taken him to the FIMU de Belfort, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Institut français de Kinshasa. The Muziekpublique residency now offers him the working space and structural support to push that trajectory further still.

Zinne Kabar: maloya in Brussels, memory and fire

The second resident of this 2026 edition is a collective, and their story begins somewhere else entirely, on the island of Réunion, with a music that was once forced underground. Maloya is a tradition born from the island’s enslaved communities, later classified as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, but not before spending years in the 1960s as a banned form of expression, practised clandestinely at kabars, night-time gatherings where percussion and voice held on quietly against official silence. The instruments, roulèr, kayamb, pikèr, sati, carry that history in their sound. Artists like Danyèl Waro have spent decades keeping this music alive, grounded and evolving.

© Joâo Santos

It’s from within this inheritance that Jean-Didier Hoareau, known as Jidé, founded Zinne Kabar. Around him, a cosmopolitan collective: musicians from Chile, Peru, Colombia and Belgium, each bringing Latin American and African influences into conversation with maloya’s rhythmic and vocal core. The result is a maloya that is expansive and communal, festive without abandoning its spiritual depth, a music that honours where it comes from while reaching outward. Still relatively new on the scene, Zinne Kabar has already performed at Recyclart, the Polysons festival, Hide & Seek, and Sounds Resists. The Muziekpublique residency will now help structure and amplify what’s clearly already in motion.

Twelve months, one purpose

Over the next twelve months, both artists and collective will have access to everything Muziekpublique knows how to do: repertoire development, artistic coaching, live set work, technical production, promotion support and at least one concert within Muziekpublique’s own walls. The aim isn’t to shape these artists into something more palatable or more marketable, it’s to give them the conditions to become more fully themselves.

Follow Shak Shakito and Zinne Kabar on Muziekpublique’s website and social channels. Their first Brussels dates are coming and you’ll want to be there.