Michelle Samba (b. 1990, Friesland/Congo) is a drummer, a poet, and an artist who builds her practice in series. Between the series, and inside them, the question is the same: what does a gesture cost, and who pays, and how does that become visible to someone who was not present when the cost was incurred.
Her materials are chosen because they already know the answer before she asks. Blood has a finite quantity and a biological owner. Deaccessioned paper has been processed and discarded by one institution before it enters a second. Hair carries a history that was not negotiated. A drum is a technology everyone uses and almost no one has questioned since the first person decided this is how it should work. Samba's three active series build from these facts without commenting on them.
In I, Hereby, the anchor work of her Table & Chair series, she stamped deaccessioned institutional paperwork with ink made from her own blood for six days, seven hours each, without intermission. The stamps were self-designed — her own classificatory grammar, built after months in the Joseph Beuys archive through the Marina Abramović Institute's residency programme at Museum Schloss Moyland, where Beuys' Office for Direct Democracy was conceived fifty years earlier. The pile that formed over those days was not documentation. It was the work, and it continues to accumulate weight with each new context it enters. ENTRY, also within Table & Chair and presented at the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra, stages a desk of unsent letters: correspondence as the only available gesture inside a system that has already decided what gets processed. Article 0: Ask for a Hand assembles a temporary constitution for whichever room it enters, with the audience as its signatories and the stamped residue as the sole record of what was agreed to and what was not.
Hit Me Baby One More Time addresses the murder of her mother. Not as testimony: as a problem of composition. Through drums, rope, tempo, and the specific distribution of attention across performer and whoever is present, the ongoing Depletion series holds this material without resolving it, because the biographical fact at its centre is one that was processed and closed by a system that had no instrument for what remained. Gateways, within Procedural Rhythm and presented at Oerol, extends meters of braided hair through forest or architectural space, drumsticks fixed at the ends, gongs at distances that require the audience to move. Presence here is not a theme; it is the compositional unit. Rhine Mouth Resonant Kit (Condition Report), the series' flagship work in development, approaches the drum kit as a condition to be reported: an object whose conventions of use, display, and attributed value have never been examined by the people who inherited them. In 2023 she performed a live score for Ai Weiwei's Little Girls Cheeks at Kunsthal Rotterdam and performed alongside Nikita Gale at NEST Den Haag. She recites other poets' work at literary events, not as homage but as continuation of a series she did not begin and will not end. She drums solos that treat the inherited form of the kit as a starting point for a question nobody asked. The etching plate, the stamp, the folk dance, the scored action: all of them are technologies that arrived with conventions attached, and the practice is built on pausing there.
Friesland and Congo have each been extracted from. Both carry the residue of arrangements made elsewhere. Her practice does not illustrate this. It is structured the same way.
Samba received the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Talent Award in 2020 and has worked with the Marina Abramović Institute since 2022. Her work has been presented at Oerol, Explore the North, Motel Mozaïque, Chale Wote, Kunsthal Rotterdam, and Museum Schloss Moyland.
