This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my PhD dissertation, slightly edited and enriched of various media. I prepared this post for the reading list of my course in Regional Studies of Culture – West Africa on Ways of Knowing in the Mande. Learning to hunt One of the crucial days of my fieldwork,…

Three years ago, precisely on 25 March 2011 I was in Orford Ness, a shingle spit on the Suffolk coast that the National Trust turned into a natural reserve. But before being valued as a nature conservation site, Orford Ness was owned by the Ministry of Defence. Important research for the development of radar technology…

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.

My friend Nicola Scaldaferri, researcher in Ethnomusicology at the University of Milan, visited me here in Burkina from late December to January the 20th. We spent a very intense week in Karankasso, using my contacts to make an idea of the musical richness of the village. We filmed the construction of the baan, the Sambla…

Today, with my friend Nicola Scaldaferri, researcher in Ethnomusicology at the University of Milan, I drove to Banzon to record a performance of donso music by Diakari Traoré and Bakari Ouattara. We set up a room of Bakari’s house in Banzon to record as best we could with two Rode NT55 to Sound Devices 744T. With…