Artist Pedro Reyes says he wanted to promote recycling, better gun control

Oct 31, 2012 18:11 GMT  ·  By

Hoping to raise awareness with respect to both environmental protection and the Mexican drug war's death toll, artist Pedro Reyes took 6,700 guns used to kill people during said war and turned them into musical instruments.

Apparently, each note coming out of these instruments is meant to act as a reminder of how guns killed as many as 80,000 people in Mexico during a time frame of just six years, Inhabitat explains.

According to the same source, these gun-instruments look so much like their run-off-the-mill counterparts because Pedro Reyes asked for the help of six musicians when designing and manufacturing them.

“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,” Pedro Reyes commented with respect to this project.