Death metal: The Mexican artist who makes musical instruments from firearms

Sculptor Pedro Reyes has used hundreds of guns to make instruments



Weapons used were seized in the city of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico

Around 10 people were shot a day in the city at the height of the violence

The guns that have caused so many deaths and wrecked thousands of lives in northern Mexico are now making music.

Sculptor Pedro Reyes has taken hundreds of guns seized in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and transformed them into artistic musical instruments.

He has cut down gun barrels to different lengths to sound like marimbas while other pistol parts have been turned into cymbals.



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Top gun: Mexican sculptor Pedro Reyes pictured next to an instrument made out of used weapons that mimics the sound of a bass guitar

Top gun: Pedro Reyes picked out the weapons he wanted to use in the project out of 6,700 guns that were seized

Reyes said: 'It's important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons, as if a sort of exorcism was taking place .'



When they were played, he said, 'the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for lives lost.'

For the project titled 'Disarm', Reyes said he was able to choose his instruments from about 6,700 guns that were turned in or seized by the army and police in Ciudad Juarez, a city of about 1.3 million people where 10 people were shot a day at the height of the violence.



In 2010, Ciudad Juarez had a murder rate of 230 killings to every 100,000 inhabitants. The nationwide rate for the U.S. that year was 4.8.



Hooting sounds: Former rifles, seized by the army and police in Ciudad Juarez, have been transformed into a rustic piano

Invention: Reyes made this circular xylophone just using the parts of old guns

Reyes said : '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 has used weapons in his previous artworks. In 2008, he melted down 1,527 weapons to make the same number of shovels to plant the same number of trees.

This latest project began last year with a phone call offering him another chance to work with the seized guns.



'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? ".'



Drug-cartel violence cost more than 70,000 lives in Mexico over the last six years with many of the weapons used by the cartels smuggled across the border from the United States.

Transformation: Pedro Reyes tests a drum-like set made out of gun parts at his workshop in Mexico City

Disarming: Reyes described playing the instruments as an 'exorcism' of their violent past

In 2012, then-president Felipe Calderon inaugurated a billboard in Ciudad Juarez which, facing Texas, spelled out the words 'No More Weapons' in welded pieces of decommissioned guns.



Reyes also hopes to take his message international, with an exhibition of the musical instruments in London's Lisson Gallery in March and later in the United States.



'This project has a pacifist intent, to create a global consciousness about arms trafficking,' Reyes said.



Violence has become a theme in Mexican art in recent years. One artist from the violence-plagued state of Sinaloa, Teresa Margolles, works with artifacts collected from crime scenes, such as pieces of glass or cloth dabbed with mud and blood.



Reyes stresses that his work 'is not just a protest, but a proposal'.



'It occurred to me to make musical instruments, because music is the opposite of weapons,' Reyes said. 'This exercise of transformation we see with the guns, is what we would like to see in society.'



A loaded task: Reyes has dedicated his last two years transforming weapons used to kill into works of art

Checking the load: A worker organises a set of seized guns in the workshop of Mexican sculptor Pedro Reyes

Violent past: The guns were seized in Ciudad Juarez where around 10 people were shot dead every day at the height of the country's gun violence



