Pedro Reyes Turns Guns Into Musical Instruments

Pedro Reyes Turns Guns Into Musical Instruments.

I thought this was truly a unique idea and send a clear message to people about how something that causes so much hurt can bring so much joy… take a page out of his book NRA. The guns of northern Mexico have found a new purpose instead of causing so many more deaths they are now making music. Mechanical hammers ping against once used ammunition magazines from assault rifles, while gun barrels cut to different lengths ring like marimbas and pistol parts strike metal plates like cymbals. Sculptor Pedro Reyes told the Associated Press that “it’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons, as if a sort of exorcism was taking place.”He continued to say,”the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for lives lost.”

The title of the project is called “Disarm” and he had the opportunity to choose from 6,700 guns that were seized or turned in by the army and police in Ciudad Juarez, a city that sees 10 killing a day in a population of 1.3 million people. The city had a murder rate of 230 per 100,000 inhabitants, while the nationwide rate for the U.S. was 4.8 for the year. Reyes said in an interviews while demonstrating his instruments that,”the dramatic thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of all the weapons that are seized every day and that the army has to destroy.” Reyes was well known already for his 2008 project called “Palas por Pistolas,” or “Pistols to Shovels,” where he used melted down weapons to make 1,527 shovels same as the number of weapons and planted the same number of trees. The new project began last year as Reyes explains,”normally, they bury or destroy them, but someone who works in the government said, `Would you be interested in making a sculpture with this metal?'” Reyes hopes to take his message global,”this project has a pacifist intent, to create a global consciousness about arms trafficking.”

Violence has become a theme in Mexican art as another artist, Teresa Margolles, uses artifacts collected from crime scenes from the violence plagued state of Sinaloa. The reason behind Reyes musical sculptures are explained,”It occurred to me to make musical instruments, because music is the opposite of weapons. This exercise of transformation we see with the guns, is what we would like to see in society.”