La Escopetarra, Cesar Lopez

Amigos de Colombia

Colombian musicians turn guns into guitars to make music - as well as a point.

By Kevin Sites, Apr 24, 2006
hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs3860

BOGOTA, Colombia - It's not long after you enter the world of Cesar Lopez that you realize he doesn't color inside the lines.

He is a classically-trained musician and composer who studied at Colombia's best conservatory. But instead of concert hall performances he chooses to play his music on the streets of Bogota. He writes all of his songs on air-sickness bags he collects during his travels.

"It's appropriate," he says, "because I feel I'm vomiting up what I have inside me."

But despite the description, the music he composes and plays is haunting and beautiful — hardly repulsive.

His comfortable Bogota apartment is filled with the tools of his trade, a baby-grand piano, guitars, amps — as well as the evidence that his subversively creative mind has few boundaries.

Near the piano, on a black stand that resembles a bipod, sits a Winchester lever action rifle. On its polished barrel are four hash marks, representing, says Lopez, the four people killed by it.

But there's much more to the gun than its history: six metal guitar strings stretch from the mid-point of its wooden stock, across the loading chamber, past the fret board threaded over the weapon's barrel, ending at a guitar neck flaring past the muzzle.
It's part of project in which Lopez transforms weapons of war into instruments of killer sound, using them in a kind of political performance art.

"What we want to create is an invitation to an attitude of change," he says. "It says a lot of different things — but the main idea is that weapons can be changed from an object of destructiveness to an object of constructiveness."

Cesar Lopez

When he says we, he means the other 100 or so members of a group calling themselves the Battalion of Immediate Artistic Reaction — musicians and political activists, tired of Colombia's four-decade old war of attrition, committed not only to making music, but also making a point.

Using Internet meet-ups, the battalion mobilizes every time there is some kind of guerrilla attack in Bogota, heading out into the streets to serenade the victims with soothing music.

It was during the 2003 bombing of the El Nogal nightclub which killed 36 people in the capital's trendy Zona Rosa district that Lopez got the idea for turning guns into guitars.

"We were playing our music on the streets near the club," he says, "when I noticed that a soldier was holding his rifle the same way I was holding my guitar."

The prototype hangs on Lopez's wall, but the design has evolved.

"In the first one," he says, pointing out the strings suspended above the gunstock, "the guitar isn't well integrated with the gun. But it's better now. The gun is in service to the guitar, which is the idea."

Lopez says he gets the guns through an anti-land mine group connected to Colombia's peace commissioner's office. Most of the firing components are removed so it can no longer be fired.

Then a guitar maker adds the fretboard, strings and neck as well as an input for the electric amp.

"Violence fears love because it is stronger," Lopez says, strumming the gun guitar on a hammock strung between two walls of his living room. "Violence fears my voice because it goes beyond death."

Only a few dozen of the guitar guns have been manufactured so far, most being used by members of the Battalion when they respond to attacks.

But I wonder if those who just suffered from violence would really want to be serenaded by musicians playing guns.

"The attitude of most people is very good, except at airports," he laughs. But there are definitely critics.

By webmanco on Mar 6, 2008, 06:10 in Friendly Talkzone.

PALEOLITICO says on Mar 6, 2008, 07:34:

ME GUSTA LA ESCOPETARRA!!

"Amar a la gente y usar las cosas y NO amar a las cosas y usar la gente" www.paleolitico.net

Simon says on Mar 6, 2008, 11:11:

Great article, thanks Webmanco!

"You want to talk to God? Let's go see him together, I've got nothing better to do."---Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark)