Pan Sen Fron — Tambourines Without Borders — Plovdiv, Bulgaria · April 2019

Pandeireteiras sen Fronteiros is a Galician traditional-music group built around voice and percussion, especially the pandeireta, or tambourine. Founded in A Coruña in 2014, the group works with songs recovered through research and fieldwork and seeks to keep Galicia's oral musical traditions alive while also placing them in conversation with the folk traditions of other cultures.

I encountered the group in Plovdiv in 2019, when the city was a European Capital of Culture. Their performance was striking in its simplicity: voices, tambourines, rhythm and movement were enough to create an intense musical presence. There was no large instrumental arrangement separating the performers from the audience; the sound came directly from their hands and voices.

I was also interested in their clothing. In our conversation they explained that the costumes were not intended as a single uniform. Instead, they referred to different everyday identities — fisherman, farmer, musician and others — allowing each performer to retain an individual character. That combination of collective rhythm and personal identity is what I tried to preserve in these photographs.