La Fontana Foundation’s exhibition “Music in your Fingers. African Sansas” will officially open ‎on 19 September. The event is entirely dedicated to sansas, one of the most characteristic ‎families of instruments on the African continent.‎
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The exhibition, which is curated by Elena Martínez-Jacquet, can be seen until 30 August 2020 ‎and will include over thirty pieces. It marks the start of the new collaboration with the La ‎Fontana Foundation, a dedicated private art establishment founded in 1992 to house and ‎conserve the Helena Folch-Rusiñol collection, which contains almost 2,000 traditional musical ‎instruments from Africa, Oceania, Asia and America, as well as 14,000 Spanish ceramic pieces.‎

‎The sansa, a truly African instrument‎
The instruments known as sansas – one of the most common names for them in the local ‎languages – have long been exclusive to the African continent, from the Ivory Coast to ‎Mozambique, passing through Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where ‎most of the items held at the La Fontana Foundation come from. In the late eighteenth ‎century, the use of these instruments spread to the Americas as a result of the forced ‎migrations caused by the slave trade.‎
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The first visual evidence of these type of objects, which were then known as pianinos or ‎thumb pianos as they are played mainly by plucking the tines with the thumbs, dates back to ‎the early 17th century, documenting pieces brought back from the Congo River basin by ‎Portuguese and Italian missionaries.‎