Tag "work"

Updates and work in progress

5 August, 2018

Harvest Competition in Terranova di Pollino

One of the missing pieces from the mosaic I am trying to put together on wheat festivals in Basilicata has to do with production, since in order to make the offerings I photographed at rituals and processions during the past years one needs wheat spikes that are harvested by hand. While wheat is farmed in…

21 November, 2014

The Speaking Balafon

In the past two weeks I have been presenting some video fragments from the footage I am working on for the documentary The Sambla Baan. First for a presentation in Italy and later for my course on West Africa here in Manchester, I selected two short scenes that show interactions between the musician playing the…

31 August, 2014

Numuya – The blacksmiths of Koko

When on fieldwork in Burkina Faso, working on donso hunters and their knowledge of the bush, I found myself to need a shotgun in order to join the hunters in their outings. In Bobo Dioulasso I came across Boubacar Traoré, who comes from a Jula family of blacksmiths. He sold me a locally made 12-gauge…

26 June, 2012

Rhythm at Work

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.

10 June, 2012

What a Donso Wears

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…

20 January, 2012

The Music of Karankasso Sambla

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…

18 December, 2011

How to Make Gunpowder

Go-Seydou Traoré is a blacksmith, he works iron and wood following the Mande tradition of numu families. He has big, strong hands, and makes chips fly around when he cuts the hard wood he makes mortars from. But he is at the same time a very gentle and sensitive person, who often comes by to…