The 45-year-old Tanyaszínház in Vojvodina is touring with a performance based on Sándor Petőfi's epic A helység kalapácsa, entitled Wayfinders (Útkeresők).
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.
3:00 PM MYT
Every week, Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura wanders through a messy military junkyard in search of sounds.
Picking through discarded rifles, helmets and missiles, he taps, blows and raps 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 unravelled 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.
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Cellist Milica Svirac plays a cello converted from a bazooka and army gas bucket, made by Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura at his studio in Novi Sad on February 1. AFP
Tune change: Serbia artist turns weapons into instruments
Tue, 9 February 2021
Every week, Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura wanders through a messy military junkyard in search of sounds.
Picking through discarded rifles, helmets and missiles, he taps, blows and raps 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 unravelled Yugoslavia.
Every week, Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura wanders through a messy military junkyard in search of sounds.
Picking through discarded rifles, helmets and missile