Lacole Traoré tells the story of how a balafon typical of Guinea arrived in his village of Samorogouan, in Western Burkina Faso, and entered the history of his family. The story is one of circulation of musical knowledge and defies most accepted wisdom on griots and musical traditions in West Africa. This music is now…

One of my best friends is a theatre director and when I was still living in Milan, Italy, I happened to shoot his end-of-the-year plays at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Scuola Paolo Grassi. One of his latest works is the direction of two plays out of the five short pieces that make up Storie…

The more I venture myself into the world of donsoya, the more I am convinced that I could only study it by becoming part of it. Going through all the different stages of initiation and apprenticeship is revealing many interesting things. One of the most striking was to discover how complicated it is for hunters…

Today I was initiated to the hunting association of the village I’m living in. I was expecting the moment of initiation to come after a period of apprenticeship, but apparently here the use is different from what I read. They prefer to let you into the association first, as a way of submitting your subsequent…