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Pedro Reyes

Return to Sender
Disarm music box
For the work group Disarm, he was able to use 6,700 weapons confiscated in the Mexican drug war and transform these into musical instruments[…] They play well-known, classical music pieces from the respective manufacturer’s country of origin. A musical box made with Glock pistol parts plays Mozart, Beretta barrels Vivaldi, while Reyes’s weapon of choice for Swiss songwriter Mani Matter is the Carabine. Reyes is concerned with «upcycling» – transforming an instrument of death into a musical instrument that stands for dialog and exchange. He undertakes this transformation process with the conviction that the physical act is always accompanied by an idealistic one and appeals to the spiritual dimension of this quasi-alchemical operation towards the good.

Vtol

Oil
The main idea of this project is to present exhibition visitors with the chance to destroy any object that might happen to be on their person, in order to transform it into a unique sound composition. The installation consists of five hydraulic presses, capable of crushing practically any object (a mobile telephone, pair of glasses, headphones or whatever). In the process of destruction, a special microphone records the sounds made as the object undergoes deformation, and in just a few minutes, a computer algorithm transforms them into a 20 minutes album.