From Postcards to Protest: a wave of young folk revival is reclaiming Identity from tourism voyeurism
“Globalization is contamination,” they say. But what happens when contamination becomes erasure? When folklore turns into a format, and traditions are reduced to souvenirs and aesthetics?
There’s a paradox at the heart of globalization: everything is more accessible, yet increasingly uniform. Cities become stages for tourism, local shops mere spots for social media content, and folk music a background sound for luxury restaurants. This is cultural gentrification: not just of spaces, but of identities, gestures, and sounds, all colonized by capitalist logic.
As a Sicilian, I can attest that Taormina is one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon. A decade ago, it was already an international tourist hub, but it still felt Sicilian. Today, it’s the island’s upper crust lounge, and our space within it has shrunk dramatically. It has become a luxury destination, curated and exclusive—luxury firms’ boutiques, resorts, enormous prices. A polished aesthetic often stripped of its original meaning, the one only we, the locals, can truly give it. Folklore still exists, but it’s tailored to the tourist gaze.
I talked with Salvatore, who owns a small ceramic workshop in the heart of Taormina. He’s been working clay his whole life. Today, he does it less for economic survival and more out of a moral duty to our culture.
Speaking about his customers, he says:
“People don’t look at the work anymore—they look at the Instagram shot. They used to come to understand how an object was made. Now they just come in, take a photo, and leave. It’s more important that the object ‘looks’ Sicilian than that it actually is. Authenticity is often sacrificed on the altar of marketability.”
Traditional music and dance face a similar fate. Once expressions of collective identity, now they are “cultural experiences” to be consumed during a themed dinner or evening show.
In this context, young locals grow up feeling detached or even ashamed of their heritage. The dominant narrative has long painted tradition as something old, outdated, even provincial. The result is cultural flattening: traditions are reduced to picturesque clichés, and in Sicily’s case, to postcard-style “Sicilian-ness.”
But things are changing. Across Europe, a new wave of artists is reinterpreting folk culture—not as nostalgic revival, but as resistance. They’re blending tradition with modernity, authenticity with experimentation, memory with subversion.
Spain is at the forefront of this movement.
Internationally renowned artist Rosalía has said in an interview with Dazed:
“I wanted to find a possible bridge between electronic sounds and heritage music.” “Flamenco is powerful, visceral, emotional. You feel it in your skin. I wanted to carry it with me, everywhere.”
And she did: flamenco is now heard on global radio.
For Rodrigo Cuevas, folklore is not a relic—it’s a political act. The queer Asturian artist reclaims rural traditions and queers them, recharging their power.
“Folklore isn’t old. It’s a language that’s still alive,” he told to Diario de León. “We must use it to talk about what matters today.”
Then there’s Juanjo Bona, who, with his album Recardelino, brought Aragonese jota back into the youth pop scene. Speaking to Heraldo, he said:
“In jota, I found an inexhaustible source of inspiration. […] I defend what I’ve always defended: my folklore, my way of being, and my people.”
His tour drew thousands of young people across Spain. Over the past year, he has introduced audiences from Italy, Portugal, Latin America, and France to Aragonese songs born centuries ago.
In Italy, the most iconic name in the new neofolk scene is La Niña (Carola Moccia), a Neapolitan artist who blends dialect, electronics, mysticism, and rebellion. She declares:
“Dialect isn’t the past. It’s the future. It’s a weapon to be authentic.” “I grew up with grandmothers singing at home. Those lullabies are still there—only now, they have an electronic beat underneath.”
In her album Furesta, Neapolitan tradition blends with baroque, spiritual, and queer references. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she declared:
“I’m not reproducing tradition. I’m summoning its spirits.”
And she’s not alone. In recent days, a young artist named Delia Buglisi, Sicilian like me, has captured national attention through her participation in Italy’s X-Factor. She’s stood out among a pool of talented contestants by singing in Sicilian dialect and arranging songs with strong folkloric influences. Her social media is filled with videos of her performing in Sicilian. One of her recent posts is captioned: “Nun ti scurdari d’unni veni”— “Don’t forget where you come from.” Each post garners thousands of likes, reflecting a growing interest among young audiences in a musical genre that refuses to erase history in favor of capitalist monotony.
What unites all these artists—from Spain to Sicily—is their refusal to let tradition be reduced to a postcard, they make it alive. And by doing so, they make it universal. They show us that tradition isn’t inherently tied to outdated values like machismo, exclusion, or conformity.
As La Niña said: “Tradition can be rebellious. It can be female, queer, sacred, and blasphemous all at once.”
In short, folklore doesn’t have to be a cage—it can be a language to speak of something new: inclusion, tolerance, justice, respect for difference. It can also serve as a counter-narrative to the increasingly prevalent discourse of hatred and violence.
So the question remains: do we only want to look (like tourists), or do we want to return (to our roots)? The rediscovery of folklore can be a passing trend or a cultural revolution. It all depends on how we live it, who tells the story and who listens. The challenge is to respect without freezing, to innovate without erasing.
Culture should never be static.
But it should never be mere decoration, either.
