Coumba Samba

I grew up in New York, but also in Senegal. In the city, I lived in Harlem, where I shared a room with my siblings that overlooked this small back garden filled with shrubs. In Senegal, my window looked into the house.

In New York, it was just a really full house, and I was bullied in school. I remember the city having a very specific bustling sound. When I was young, I loved the sound of cars driving in the rain. That was special to me. Senegal is crazy in a different way. It’s more rhizomatic, very alive. I was living with an evil stepmother which wasn’t fun. But it is still very dear to me, and I go back. You can just do more in New York, which really helped me figure out who I am as a person.

I work with abstraction mostly to tell stories. When I first started making things, I was interested in telling not only my own stories, but also my family’s—which is basically the struggle. And in using the colors of my mom’s apartment, I’m doing just that; her living situation has always been a bit precarious.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily simplifying. It’s trying to figure out how to best represent something that’s already abstract, but physically. It still feels like the original content, but it's transformed. People just have to know it or find their own association with it.

Hidden systems and networks in the world that we can’t see, like global trade for example.

I think it’s important for people to not always be making “new” things. I’m pro-environment in that sense and there’s so much already available to be used. Almost anything can be cleaned and remade into something else.

Yes. A lot of these objects are dark, but also beautiful in a way. They use specific colors for specific reasons. I try to do the same.

It’s mainly ecological. When it comes to aesthetics, you can make almost anything look like anything else. We should all try to avoid being wasteful, and my work tends to deal with the recycling of forms in particular. Everything I do has already been seen before, in terms of modernist art history.

I had only recently started making art again when I was asked to do the show, so I grouped together everything I was interested in. Looking back, it’s quite layered with all of my research on exchange between the two places. I was exploring desire, where that comes from, the whole colonial history. There were parts of the work meant to be ironic or funny.

It depends a lot on your local environment, and it’s often based on the people around you—like someone else has something you want, and you want to be them so you get the same thing. There are also lots of messages in the world about what your life should be like and what you should possess to be of a certain status. Wherever you go, it’s always more or less the same. Designer items, for example, are a consistent want.

When I got back to New York after living in Senegal. I was only nine years old, but in school, it was like, “Who has a BlackBerry? Who has the new Nintendo DS?” If you didn’t have those things, you were seen differently. You were poor. It was a status thing.

It’s possible, but it’s not something I’m trying to do. I don’t think creating something referential diminishes its value. You can still find ways to look at it differently. I also try to make sure my work isn’t too much of a reach—people can interpret it however they want.

Well, I had turtles growing up. They were so cute. It was the first time I had to really take care of something. Sadly, one day, one of them went missing. Then the other one stopped eating because their friend was gone. That was kind of my first heartbreak. When I moved to London in 2019, I was really depressed and decided to get turtles to revive my inner child, but they didn’t get along. After I finally moved back to New York, I wanted to bring them here, but it was really complicated to get the proper paperwork for them to come. So, for a second time, I had to let them go.

I was thinking about the gallery environment, the white cube, and I thought it would be interesting to introduce some kind of life form to change the energy of the space.

Formally, I was thinking about how the radiator is in everyone’s home and you kind of interact with it on a daily basis, which made it perfect for the subject. I usually start with a subject that I’m interested in or read about, like resource extraction or warfare, and then I find a way to make it physical.

I was living in London when there were lots of news stories about a gas shortage, so it was on everyone’s mind. The news was saying to turn off the gas if you didn’t need it, but I knew there was a whole history behind the local crisis that expands across the globe. Russia has a huge connection to Africa, which I don't think a lot of people know about, so I attempted to bridge all these things together.

Earth is mother. It’s really sad that we’ve gone to this state where it’s deteriorating. Everyone’s seeing these signs of climate change. There are lots of hypocrisies. It feels like a sign of the times that everyone is genuinely so narcissistic; we’re at this place of no return, but we don’t really care enough to do anything about it. No one is down to be like, “Maybe this thing is serious, maybe I can change small things in my life.” So the hyperconsumption continues.

For sure. That comes with living here in New York, where there’s so much access to things. I’ve seen the other side in Senegal, where there isn’t. The entire continent is so rich in resources, but access to the technology made out of these resources is super restricted. Here in the West, we can do everything and don’t really have any thought behind it. That’s the goal of capitalism: to not have anyone thinking.

I was lucky with that piece. I was working with people that were professional dancers, so when I asked them to move in a more deconstructed way that would make it more like art and not dance, they just did their thing. The topic of the show had to do with the flow of capital. I was looking at FIFA, which is the biggest sports organization in the world, but a lot of these industries aren’t about what they say they are. It’s actually all about money, as usual.

I think it’s good to work with what you have and things that are available to you; it’s more sustainable, and it’s also recognizable. I like for people to already have some sort of association with whatever I’m creating, even if it results in something completely unfamiliar.

When Gretchen and I started the project, we called the music “girl pop,” playing with this idea of the woman performer and what you can look like and do to gain success. It’s all very American, this idea of a pop star.

Sometimes the art and music overlap. Our songs are always about something other than the subject matter. At that time, I think Gretchen and I were both depressed about the world, and it just came out that way.

I guess that’s the whole thing—question everything. Don’t take anything at face value.

There’s really no answer. Since I genuinely care about what’s going on in the world, I try to make work that says, “Here, we should do something.” When I first returned from Senegal, we had Obama and his whole thing about hope—not necessarily that we can trust our government, but that we can all take action and something might happen. Now that I’ve grown up, though, I fear that we are all helpless in a system so grand.

I’ll start with my great-great-grandkids. Rebel, I guess. I don’t know what state the world is going to be in. For my ancestors, thank you. I look back on my mom’s old photos and all these women that she was surrounded with, and they’re all so beautiful and powerful. I really believe in things being passed down through generations. I feel like I’ve inherited certain traits from them, like happiness. I also feel like my grandmother who passed is somewhat guiding me in life. I never got to meet her as she lived in Senegal and died a week after I was born, but I’m named after her and for some reason I always feel her spirit around.

I’m not in the most optimistic space right now. But I think the fact that we sent Voyager I and II into space is cute. There’s something special about a bunch of people from different fields gathering things to send into space as a way of saying, “This is who we are.”

I think so. Our perception of life is very human-centered and based on our own consciousness. If you zoom out, we don’t really know what’s going on beyond the clouds.

I was actually thinking about this yesterday because I was watching The Sopranos. Junior Soprano was like, “I want to be cremated and put as a mantelpiece.” And Tony was like, “We’ll put you right under the moose head.” But I’m not sure. I know a lot of people are buried in clothes, which I think is demented. I don’t think I want to be in a coffin. I want to be in the ground somehow, naked. There are these mushroom coffins that turn your body into mushrooms, which is interesting, but they look really ugly.