Why do these exist?

I’d been there a week: sleeping in the empty nuns’ quarters above the hospital in Nuevo Progreso, a village in western Guatemala - the highlands - six hours from the capitol. In the days I’d play music I’d written for the villagers—for the sick and their families. In the nights I’d watch lightning storms rage far down the mountain, many miles away toward the coast and toward Mexico.

When it came time to return to my life, I packed my guitar and got on the bus that snaked its way through the jungle. I fell in and out of sleep.

It felt so real.

I was playing my guitar, but the sounds that came from the strings were strange: wild and elemental, like a thousand lightning storms and like a mountain eroding away into dust and rising back up again. I looked down at the guitar, and found that the jungle had grown into it: reclaiming the dead wood and bringing it back to life. The music was a lament for the endless cycle of plants sprouting, flowering, dying and becoming dirt and growing again into new plants—the pain and joy of endless resurrection.

The bus lurched. I woke up.

And the Resurrection Guitar was born.

OK - so what, you mutant?

Living Instruments poses answers to these questions:

1) Do we really need art - what if it needed us back?

2) What if to save art, we have to destroy it?

3) What might music look like?

At face value, these are sculptures with a base layer of a broken musical instrument. The instruments contain installations that include living plants. As you water them to keep the plants alive, the instruments eventually change, and will potentially decay. Same goes for giving them sun. If you don’t take care of the individual plants, they will die. But if you do take care of them, the instrument will probably be destroyed.

The wooden instruments themselves were once alive—they came from living trees. To create music, which is an expression of life, those trees had to give their lives. So, Living Instruments puts life back into that which has died.

Also, just like a musical instrument, the Living Instruments require regular attention. With your tuba or flute or whatever, you have to practice it, or you’ll get rusty and the instrument will lack the life that comes from having music in it. With Living Instruments, if you don’t tend to them, they will show you what not practicing looks like from the perspective of the neglected piano that you can just never find time to practice. Also, if you have a living instrument and are not caring for it, perhaps you are also getting rusty, in a slightly different way.

When the instrument decays or when a plant dies - how you feel when you witness that is part of the art.

During the moments it comes out of the bell of a tuba or the belly of a guitar, music is a momentary expression of the musician’s soul. Living Instruments aims to show what that expression might look like if we could somehow freeze it and wrap living tissue around it. Imagine each living instrument as a vision of a song, a lick or even just one mournful note.

Give us a shout:

Name

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Subject

Message