“Culture is disappearing like wildlife: masks, music, instruments”

by Naomi House

A few years back one of my friends and I were walking around town and he stopped to take a photograph of the hospital parking lot.  So of course I asked him, “why.”  He told me that going through his family’s photo albums that the images that really stuck with him were the ones where old cars that are no longer on the road were in them.  So he thought, hey, someday the cars we see as normal and maybe don’t appreciate will give my descendants the same emotional reaction.  You don’t know what you have til its gone so his theory was, better to preserve the whole parking lot in an image than try and guess which car will be the one that draws future generations interests.

Today, Instruments4Africa is also working on preservation through images, in this case moving images, to be sure that future generations can see what is fast disappearing.  “Culture is disappearing like wildlife: masks, music, instruments,” Instruments4Africa founder Paul Chandler has said.  They already have footage for their next series of documentaries. Paul and his team have used private funding to keep the work going for now, but this temporary fix is not sustainable. Enter T160K!  We want to help them complete production of these videos so Instruments4Africa can release them to the worldwide public. They need $2,400 per video to cover production, including editing, sound, translation, and subtitles. With dozens of languages commonly-spoken in Mali, translation alone is a significant effort.  This topic is one we’ll be discussing in future blog posts too.  It isn’t enough to just preserve but to translate and we hope you join us in helping keep this heritage preserved for all time!

Read more at Filming Music is PRESERVING Music!

 

All photos copyright Paul Chandler and Instruments4Africa used with permission

also re-published 4/10/15