Last Friday, Chicago-based artists María Gaspar and Thaddeus Tukes presented a performance at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center that transformed decommissioned prison bars into a playable xylophone, drawing attention to issues of carceral injustice and prison abolition.
The performance, initially conceived by Gaspar and activated musically by Tukes, used sound and space to challenge ideas of confinement, demonstrating how materials designed for restriction can be repurposed to amplify voices and foster change.
Gaspar explained that the bars, collected from the demolished remnants of Chicago’s Cook County Jail’s Division 1, were carefully adapted with resonator boxes to produce tone without altering their original form.
“It was like trying to figure out the best format to keep the prison bars as is without changing too much of it so that people can see it for what it actually is. But then, through the musician’s touch, it becomes transformed,” Gaspar said.
Tukes, a Chicago-based vibraphonist, brought the bars to life through a combination of drums, the vibraphone and the prison bar-constructed xylophone.
The performance opened with drums, drawing attention to the rhythm of confinement, before moving into melodic patterns on the xylophone and vibraphone.
“I had to get really creative to tell the narrative,” Tukes said.
“I used the kick drum to simulate the banging of doors, the cymbals to simulate the rattling of keys by prison guards and the bars themselves to illustrate the resourcefulness and creativity of people confined by the prison system.”
Tukes described the challenge of working with a set of bars in which several notes produced the same note, requiring him to adapt the same melody across different instruments.
“You know, even the process of making the melody is haunting. I only have enough notes to make that exact melody, I can’t add anything, I can’t go anywhere, I can only do that,” he said.
Gaspar said that before meeting Tukes, she had consulted with other musicians to activate the prison bars musically, but that “it didn’t sound right.”
Gaspar expressed how lucky she was to have collaborated with Tukes, who ensured the bars could produce a full range of melodic and rhythmic possibilities while retaining their historical weight.
By the end of the evening, Gaspar reflected on the ways creativity persists even in constrained environments, saying that “methods of improvisation and transmission through boundaries are a lesson for us to think about different strategies in confronting oppression.”