Arm yourself. With right things.
With art, music, expressions, impressions, sound, ideas, though, reflection…
“Disarm”, turning decommissioned weapons into music instruments is an amazing, inspiring, work by Pedro Reyes.
“The purpose of art is to come up with ways to transform the most negative instincts into creative instincts.”
– Pedro Reyes
“Disarm is a second generation of instruments built after Imagine (2012), also using the remnants of weapons that the Mexican army had collected and destroyed. The second series is made up of eight instruments that were created in collaboration with a team musicians and Cocolab, a media studio in Mexico City. These machines are mechanical musical instruments; they can be programmed and operated via computers, making them capable of performing music concerts with compositions prepared beforehand.
The various parts of these automatons are recognizable as shotguns, pistols and rifles; while they no longer pose the threat of physical harm, they keep the sheer might of their most recent purpose. Now, these former arms strum, ring, crash, hum, and vibrate at different volumes and intensities to express elaborate compositions with a wide range of sonic nuances.
Making art about guns, you can easily be seduced by the object itself, so the result may wind up praising or glorifying the object rather than critiquing it. Because of the pacifist purpose of this project, the message has to be clear so that the idea has currency for a general audience.”
– Pedro Reyes [via pedroreyes.net]
“We may not all speak the same language, but music is something universal. As a musical format, it’s a requiem for the deceased victims of violence.”
– Pedro Reyes, ‘Disarm’