Pedro Reyes is a Mexican Artist, born in Mexico city works with sculpture, architecture, video and performance...This is the work of him that i came across recently and it inspires me in the way the objects changed its worth and context in a way its had been recycled and presented as musical objects...In this work he joined the musicians to create these tremendous looking musical instruments...
In the words of the artist:
Imagine is a set of 50 musical instruments fabricated out of
destroyed weapons – revolvers, shot-guns, machine-guns, etc. This work
is a progression of Palas por Pistolas
(2008), where 1527 weapons were melted and made into the same number of
shovels to plant 1527 trees. In April this year I got a call from the
government who had learned about Palas por Pistolas,
they told me a public destruction of weapons was to take place in
Ciudad Juarez and asked me if I was interested in keeping the metal,
which would otherwise have been buried as usual. I accepted the material
but I wanted to do something new this time. 6700 weapons, cut into
parts and rendered useless, were given to me and I set out to make them
into instruments.
A group of 6 musicians worked for 2 weeks shoulder-to-shoulder
turning these agents of death into instruments of life. The task was
challenging but they succeeded in extracting sounds, from percussion to
wind and string. It’s difficult to explain but the transformation was
more than physical. It’s important to consider that many lives were
taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place the
music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for
lives lost.
This is also a call to action, since we cannot stop the violence only
at the place where the weapons are being used, but also where they are
made. There is a disparity between visible and invisible violence. The
nearly 80,000 deaths by gun-shot that have occurred in Mexico in the
last 6 years, or the school shootings in the US are the visible side of
violence. The invisible side is that one of gun trade-shows, neglecting
assault rifle bans, and shareholder profit from public companies. This
is a large industry of death and suffering for which no cultural
rejection is expressed.Guns continue to be depicted as something sexy
both in Hollywood and in video games; there may be actors who won’t smoke
on the screen, but there has not been one who would reject the role of a
trigger-happy hero.
In the last century there has been organized movements for gay
rights, gender and race equality and the environment, yet we still need
to express our desire for a world without weapons. Living in a community
free of guns ought to be a human right. Many liberties that we enjoy
today were once considered utopian, and the first step taken into that
direction was to Imagine.
Check out his blog for complete lineup of his amazing wok
www.blog.pedroreyes.net
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