Hi, I'm Jonathan Ferguson, one of the curators here at the Royal Armouries and I've been asked
to talk to you about a bit of an unusual object in our collection. It's currently
in storage, though it was on display for many years and it's 'the bird that wants to
survive' so this is a piece of art we do collect
art related to arms and armor at the Royal Armouries a lot of that or most of
that is flat traditional art, paintings and so forth
very few sculptures are in the collection and this is one of them and
it's quite a contemporary piece as you've probably spotted it is made of
guns. It was produced by the artist Fiel dos Santos forgive my pronunciation
who's working, or was working probably still is working, in Mozambique
which is a nation in Africa that's undergone quite a lot of trouble over
the years - two civil wars for one thing and after the
second civil war 1970s 80s what happened was one of the ngos, charity
organizations, people like Christian Aid went in and tried to take some of the
guns away basically there were meant to be millions of guns in the country at
the time somewhat five million or more they were able to take two hundred
thousand from the local population but you can't just take people's property, well
you can but they didn't want to so they swapped or offered exchanges, so tools I
presume aquaculture equipment as well bicycles and then those were funneled to
this artist collective in Mozambique and this particular artist in 1998 created
this of a black-winged stilt which is a local wading bird
looking at it, I haven't actually looked up the bird itself but this is the one
made of guns. So what I thought I do, after giving you a bit of a brief
history lesson is talk through some of the bits and bobs that make up this
sculpture. As you might imagine if you know anything about contemporary
conflict or even historical conflict a lot of the weapons that make up this
piece are Russian - lots of Russian influence in the civil war in Mozambique
particularly on one side. So the side that could afford it purchased the
HK g3 7.62 infantry rifle and you'll see right away probably the back end of the
bird its tail feathers if you like are made of a g3 but incidentally this is a
sectioned one from our collection and you can see for workings the buffer that's
inside that green plastic stop obviously the one on the bird is in rather worse
condition. Unsurprisingly a lot of this sculpture is made of Kalashnikov
AK specifically and this is the Chinese type 56 version with the folding
bayonet point and that's the exact variant that has been used to create
this sculpture so you can see the actually the back half of the whole
receiver of the gun the body has been cut or cut off but stop removed and then
cut off just at the magazine well and then two of those assemblies or what's
left of them have been welded in to form the body and the sort of stubby little
wings of this bird so they're quite key and core components of the creature
if you like. What else AK? Well the front sight block is actually from a different
variant this is from a, probably, well it's hard to tell to be
honest with you but probably a Russian original AK
doesn't have the AKM
slant to compensate on the front - it's actually a little bit closer though to this. Anyway you
get the idea - that's the front piece of barrel chopped of the Kalashnikov and welded in place
Not one of these though. We've then got, I don't know if anyone's ahead of me here, the legs are also Kalashnikov bolt carrier
and piston which is normally one assembly here it's been separated and
turned into two sort of thighs for the bird. Don't know that you'd get much meat off them but that's
what it is and then the piston has been cut off and
then rewelded as an angle to create the legs of the bird so, quite a creative way to
do that. This piston shape here is literally like a car piston, it's how the gun
works, that is down here - there are two more features here one but two of them
and they are again trigger partial trigger mechanism assembly or receiver
portions and this time it's the PPSH41 Russian submachine gun rifle
Russian design, this one is a Russian one 1944, it's this piece here and if I flip it
round turn it like that you should hopefully be able to see it's this whole
strip of metal here with trigger guard the trigger and the sliding safety cap
it's all still there it's just a bit welded shut now. Everything else on here
essentially found objects a scrap metal got some sort of pipe must be from a car
who knows as the neck - gun parts have their limits apparently when it comes to
sculpture. Bits of wire and then here what I initially suspected
was part of another firearm is actually a clamp or more likely from a set of jumper
cables, so the clamp end of a set of car jumper cables. I guess it looks more like
a bird's head than any bit from a firearm. I have read an article discussing the
the deeper significance and the other work of Dos Santo suggesting that there
might be pistol components as part of this sculpture as well, I
certainly can't see them if they are in there but you have I guess in a way
initially the PPSH SMG sort of stands for Russian influence over the
conflict as does the AK, also used by one side more prominently than
the other arguably, and then you have the sort of Western rival fighting
against it, so there's quit a few layers of meaning to it. It's quite a
striking piece and it's that idea of swords into plowshares I suppose