I first met Adama Woni in Banzon, in the house of Bakari Ouattara, the musician who played at my initiation. Adama is from the Dafing country, a village near the border with Mali, but spent most of his life in Banfora. He moved to Banzon in 2011, but keeps travelling all over Burkina. He is…

After about a week of delays due to the massive rain that keeps falling on my research area, I managed to have Diakari Traoré and Bakari Ouattara playing at the compound of my teacher Adama Traoré. My idea was to realise a special recording, that of the maana of my teacher, performed by his own…

On nights like these I wonder why am I not just sleeping in my bed. It is cold as I drive following Norbert to the slaughterhouse of Bobo Dioulasso. At 1am we are in his minuscule office, Norbert Ido is the Adjoint of the Chef de Service Administration et Production at the Abattoir Frigorifique de…

Rhythm at Work is a short video I realised to account for the musical quality of manual work as I witnessed here in Burkina Faso. I first prepared a short montage of four different working situations, then added out-of-sync footage using the waveform as a reference. The result is very quick-paced.

Getting to know hunting here in Karankasso also meant developing a different sensibility toward animal death, learning to cut their throat, burn their skin, take out intestines and cut them into pieces for women to prepare. In the case of bigger animals, there is really a lot of blood coming out and sounds and smells…

This is, so far, perhaps the post with the longest preparation I put together. I started gathering material in October 2011, and now can say I have more or less assembled all the materials I needed. Its focus is the characteristic uniform of the donsow, a powerful means of identification recognised by both initiated members and…