René Serrano Rodriguez Blog

My Top 4 Records I’m making this post to answer a “coffee question” from my dad: What are my four favorite albums? Or rather, the most challenging ones I’ve come across. So I decided to treat this exercise somewhat formally, simply for the pleasure of doing it well. First of all, I should say that I’m NOT a record collector; more than a music lover I’m an audiophile—and in that sense, a bit of a “hoarder.” I’ve never counted them (and I don’t intend to), but I’ll share a photo of what I have. They’re not many, really, but they make up the soundtrack of my life. I’ll start with the four albums I would take with me to a desert island: 1.- Abbey Road . Formally, it’s the last studio album recorded by  the Beatles , since Let It Be was “shelved” amid various complications and released more as an epilogue.  I own several editions, and my favorite is the 2019 remastered version. I should add that the first time I went to London, my very first activity in the morning was to go a...

It was in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, when I acquired this beautiful ritual mask from the "Bobo" tribe. I was visiting a hotel where I had to create a series of photographs for its virtual tour of the facilities when I came across this piece. I knew something about this tribe because I had an excellent art history class at Beaux-Arts Tournai. The African section in the curriculum was incredible and well-developed by my teacher Viviane Guelfi. The Bobo ethnic group is located in Africa, specifically on the border between Burkina Faso with 100,000 inhabitants and Mali with about 50,000. The Bobo ethnic group speaks a language called Mandé, primarily spoken in this region of West Africa. The Bobos are farmers, cultivating mainly millet, sorghum, and cotton, from which they make their clothes and generate some sales. Without a centralized government, they organize into lineages where the elders form a council and make decisions. The idea of a "chief" is profoundly "s...