Nikola Macura, a sculptor in Serbia, believes everything has the potential to make something beautiful.
The artist grew up in a time when Serbia was often at odds with the former Yugoslavia. As a result, there are junkyards all over the country that are filled with old helmets, rifles, and other scrapped objects of war.
Determined to transform them into lovely instruments, Nikola travels around to different military junkyards to collect these old weapons. He tests each piece of metal to see what kind of sound it could be capable of making, and then he brings the good ones back to his workshop, where he gets right to it.
So far, he’s turned an old army bucket and a bazooka into a working cello and created a violin out of a first aid kit and a rifle!
“Guns are all around us. We are so surrounded with destruction that we no longer notice it,” said Nikola, who also works as an assistant professor at Novi Sad Academy of Arts.
His “From Noise to Sound” initiative is gaining momentum. Eventually, he hopes to create an entire orchestra from this old equipment and then have war veterans play the instruments. The orchestra would travel throughout the region as a visual symbol of turning destruction into creation.
“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,” Nikola added.
The brilliant sculptor is currently working with an army tank, hoping to turn it into a massive drum that will be played by five percussionists. He plans to paint the tank bright pink just for fun!
“To make an instrument out of a tank? It’s the same as making an instrument out of a rifle. Impossible,” he said with a laugh.
Somehow, we doubt “impossible” is in this artist’s vocabulary! What a wonderful way to take something destructive and make it beautiful.
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