Beating Bombs into Plowshares

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

An unusual chair currently tours Great Britain. Look carefully and you'll see its constituent parts: Portuguese rifles and Russian AK-47s collected after Mozambique's 16-year civil war ended in 1992. Throne of Weapons, by an artist named Kester, is one of dozens of sculptures made from firearms by members of the Maputo, Mozambique-based collective N?cleo de Arte. Purchased by the British Museum in 2002, the piece lately has gone around to British museums, galleries, schools, and even a prison.

Joshua Bernstein writes in Plenty (April/May 2006) that the Mozambican nonprofit Transforming Arms Into Tools, founded by Bishop Dom Dinis Sengulane, has for a decade now collected more than 600,000 weapons by giving tools, building materials, bikes, and sewing machines to Mozambicans who turn in the guns. (The program's Portu-guese name, Transforma de Armas em Enxadas, literally means 'transforming arms into hoes.') Thousands of those weapons have gone to N?cleo de Arte, whose virtual exhibition Arms into Art (www.africaserver.nl/nucleo/eng) shows the guns transformed into human figures, birds, a reptile, a horse, and a 12-legged insectoid creature.

Kester's Throne has been so popular that the British Museum and Christian Aid, the UK- and Ireland-based antipoverty group that sponsored N?cleo de Arte's 2002 Swords into Ploughshares exhibit, last year co-commissioned a larger work called Tree of Life. The weapons that make its trunk and branches come from Sengulane's arms-gathering program. The ultimate provider, however, is the international arms industry itself. U.S. weapons makers delivered arms valued at $18.5 billion overseas in 2004, roughly four times what the next leading exporter, Russia, sent.

Given the number of weapons produced, it's no surprise that the Mozambique arms-to-art conversion project isn't unique. In Cambodia, where the government has destroyed more than 160,000 small arms since 1998, many in public ceremonial fires, British activist Neil Wilford and sculptor Sasha Constable launched Peace Art Cambodia in 2003. 'In the program's inaugural 18-month class,' Bernstein reports, 'several dozen Phnom Penh college students became metalworkers specializing in M-16 and AK-47 rifle art-including a life-size [sic] Bugs Bunny and a functional bicycle.' The resulting exhibition, To Be Deter-mined/At Arms Length, was displayed at the Wat Phnom Exhibition Center in Phnom Penh last year. The Peace Art Cambodia website (www.peaceartprojectcambodia.org) shows works remarkably similar to those made by the Mozambicans, including chairs and animal figures.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print