Instruments made from mexican Drugwar-Guns play John Lennon

 Vimeo Direktguns, via Designboom

Pedro Reyes hat aus 6700 Waffen aus dem Drogenkrieg in Mexiko 50 Musikinstrumente hergestellt und während einer Performance mit einer Band „Imagine“ von John Lennon darauf gespielt. Das Cover klingt einigermaßen ätzend, aber darum geht’s ja nun nicht wirklich: „Scrap metal recovered from destroyed weapons were used for making musical instruments. Both the fabrication of the instruments and the recording of this performance was sponsored by Fundación Alumnos 47, Mexico City.“

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 [mexican] 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.

Imagine, Designboom: an orchestra of musical instruments made from weapons by pedro reyes

Credits:
Pedro Reyes, Imagine, 2012.
Commissioned and produced by Alumnos47
Proyecto Liquido, curated by Jessica Berlanga Taylor for Alumnos47
Coordination and production, Emiliano García and Marcelo Rangel
Valenzuela
Coordination and Musical Direction, Jazmín Zepeda
Music and Instrument Designers Omar Córdova. Adrián López. Alonso
López. José Mena. Leika Mochan. Daniel Zepeda
Blacksmiths, Antonio García Salinas and Arturo Quiroz