Kora Song

“Some instruments are libraries.

A Malian kora player holds his instrument in an intimate moment. Twenty-one strings. Centuries of empires. Warm West African light on hands that have known this instrument longer than most marriages last. The kora is not being played. It is being remembered aloud.

We do not have many instruments in modern life that carry this weight — that come with a whole history attached, that ask the player to be a translator of something older than themselves. When one appears, we recognise it. Even without knowing the words.

This photograph isn’t about a single instrument.

It’s about what you carry.

What in your life are you the current keeper of — an object, a phrase, a way of doing things — that would lose something if you stopped carrying it?”