Music Instead of War…Serbian Artist Turns Weapons into Musical Instruments

Srdjan Sarovic, visual artist and a war veteran, plays on a guitar made out of M70 rifle and a helmet, made by Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura at his studio, in Novi Sad on February 1, 2021.  Andrej Isakovic/AFP
Srdjan Sarovic, visual artist and a war veteran, plays on a guitar made out of M70 rifle and a helmet, made by Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura at his studio, in Novi Sad on February 1, 2021. Andrej Isakovic/AFP
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Music Instead of War…Serbian Artist Turns Weapons into Musical Instruments

Srdjan Sarovic, visual artist and a war veteran, plays on a guitar made out of M70 rifle and a helmet, made by Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura at his studio, in Novi Sad on February 1, 2021.  Andrej Isakovic/AFP
Srdjan Sarovic, visual artist and a war veteran, plays on a guitar made out of M70 rifle and a helmet, made by Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura at his studio, in Novi Sad on February 1, 2021. Andrej Isakovic/AFP

Every week, Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura wanders through a messy military junkyard in search of sounds through discarded rifles, helmets and missiles.

He taps his knuckles on the decommissioned weapons to find pieces he can bring back to his studio and turn into musical instruments.

The 42-year-old is trying to transform these former tools of destruction into vessels of creation, in a region that still bears scars from the 1990s wars that unraveled Yugoslavia.

He has already successfully converted a bazooka and an army gas bucket into a cello, created a guitar out of a Zastava M70 rifle and a Yugoslav army helmet, and assembled a violin from an assault rifle magazine and a first aid kit, among others.

"Guns are all around us. We are so surrounded with destruction that we no longer notice it", said Macura, an assistant professor at Novi Sad Academy of Arts in Serbia's north.

There is a vast supply of material to work with: since the wars, depots selling decommissioned army equipment for pennies have become a common sight around the country.

These graveyards overflow with deactivated guns, bombs and gas masks, as well as combat vehicles, radars and even huge chunks of warplane.

The sculptor's goal is to create a full orchestra that would travel and play throughout the region, with war veterans serving as some of the musicians. "I aim to offer those people who participated in the war a chance to utilize the weapons they used to wage war to create music instead", he said.

He has already recruited veteran and visual artist Srdjan Sarovic, who likes to jam on the guitar made from a rifle and helmet.

"It disappears as a rifle and becomes exclusively a musical instrument. When I hold it in my hands and play it, all I worry about is how to align with the instrument," he told AFP. Macura's next project is turning an army tank into a percussion instrument for five musicians, which he plans to paint pink. "To make an instrument out of a tank, it's the same as making an instrument out of a rifle. Impossible," he laughed.



Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

 A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
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Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

 A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)

The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits – all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters “really disturbed me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and I thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ ... (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside.”

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But he scoffed when asked if he’d use the technology in this work.

“To take over the world?” he laughed.

The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.

“I wasn’t, early on, a very verbal person,” Burton said. “Drawing was a way of expressing myself.”

Decades later, after films including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice,” his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.

London is the exhibition’s final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a competition-winning “crush litter” sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There’s also a recreation of Burton’s studio, down to the trays of paints and “Curse of Frankenstein” mug full of pencils.

Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman.”

“We had very generous access to Tim’s archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. “And how to synthesize such a wide ranging and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge — but definitely a challenge.”

Seeing it has not been a wholly fun experience for Burton, who said he’s unable to look too closely at the items on display.

“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’ Addams Family-themed series “Wednesday.”

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective – “Burtoneqsue.” But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Each film I did was a struggle,” he added, noting that early films like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” from 1985 and “Beetlejuice” in 1988 received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.”

McLintock said Burton “is a deeply emotional filmmaker."

“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a child,” she said. "He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it’s been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.

“His films are often called dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And if they are dark, there’s a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.”