Making Bronze - 2nd attempt
Look at that beautiful bronze! We gathered on Saturday May 4, a most auspicious day to try out the new bellows and try to alloy bronze! May 4th, 1969, was the day that Silo gave his first public speech , high up in the Andes mountains, in a place called Punta de Vacas, Argentina. He had asked the military government in power at the time for permission to speak, and they had told him that if he wanted to speak, he could go up into the mountains and "talk to the rocks." So he did. The speech is known as " The Healing of Suffering " and although the whole thing took less than 20 minutes to deliver, it contains the essence of everything he would later go on to develop more fully, and in so many different ways, over the next 41 years. So it was on this 55th anniversary that Jorge, Gloria and I gathered to test out the bellows. (The last time we tried to actually make bronze, we failed: we couldn't reach the melting point for copper: 1085º C. That gave us the ide