The Studio

Rokia Bamba: 

Creating Your Trademark 

How do you make your mark as a DJ? How can sound archives inform your creative process as an artist? How do you assert yourself as a female DJ artist? Join Brussels-based sound artist, DJ and teacher Rokia Bamba to find out. 

Rokia Bamba has been worked in radio since the age of 12 and has co-founded Full Mix at Radio Campus, one of the first Hip Hop, R&B and Funk radio shows (1992). She draws her inspiration from sound archives, activism and socially engaged parties and has a unique style that mixes a cappella with groove and punk and many other genres. 

Rokia Bamba also produces sound works such as 21C/19C_Chpt3_Numbers and Comments (2017), designed for the performative projections of Antje Van Wichelen and My musical Kongo language exploration (2017), live performance at La Colonie, Paris. In 2019 and 2020, she conceived several projects at the women’s prisons in Brussels in collaboration with Lezarts Urbain and with the rap collective Murmuziek. 

This class was recorded on Zoom on 19th October 2021. 

[00:00:21] Intro
[00:05:03] Decolonising the Sound Archive
[00:09:59] Q & A
[00:22:34] ‘Le soufflé de la terre’ by Rokia Bamba
[00:32:10] Working with Sound
[00:48:17] The Importance of Music

With thanks to the students of BA Contemporary Performance Practice: Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama for taking part in the making of the video, especially Reena Black, Billy Buttars, Joy Kincaid, Juan Salazar and Jasmine Wright who gave their permission to be featured in the final edit. Also thanks to Flora Pitrolo for organising this session and incorporating it into her Performance Matters seminar series, as well as the Performance Arts lecturers David Shearing and Diana Damian Martin for their support.   

 

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