Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB), 730 (A Tribute to DJ Midas), 2025

This event is organised in partnership with La Becque | Artists’ Residence and the Afopea Cultural Centre, Lausanne.

The American artist Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) grew up to the beat of 1980s hip-hop, splitting her time between the United States and Germany. In the early 2000s, she hosted an international programme dedicated to underground hip-hop on WYBC radio in New Haven.

This performance pays tribute to her half-brother, Marques Allen Hammond, alias DJ Midas, who died in May 2004 at the age of 20. It marks the 21st anniversary of his passing.

Using her voice, a microphone and an amplifier, RMB revisits iconic tracks from the history of hip-hop that they both loved. Her performance transforms memory into an act of presence and lyrical abstraction, whilst highlighting the precariousness of Black lives in the context of the commercial export of their culture to Europe.

Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an undisciplinary™ artist-researcher who reimagines narratives of power and access through installations that blend performance, film, writing and photography. RMB has realised projects across five continents, including at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Qalam wa Lawh in Rabat, Recess in Brooklyn, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Turbine Hall in Johannesburg.

Her work has been featured in Artforum, Artsy, Performa Magazine, Prospect New Orleans, as well as on the cover of the Chicago Reader and New City. Her debut film as a director was screened at Metrograph, Slamdance, and the Oscar-qualifying Athens International Film + Video Festival, where it received a Special Jury Mention (produced by Jennifer Reeder).

RMB studied Arabic and French in Morocco. She is a graduate of Yale, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and Northwestern University, where she was taught by Paul Gilroy (BA in Sociology), Barbara DeGenevieve (BA in Photography) and Joshua Chambers-Letson (MA and PhD in Performance Studies) respectively.