The brass knuckles take their name from the body and from a war. Designed to fit the knuckles and amplify the force of a punch — breaking teeth, jaws, and skulls — the weapon was associated with U.S. troops in early 20th-century armed conflict before circulating across military and criminal contexts.

This piece reactivates that trajectory: U.S. pennies — legal tender and the smallest unit of the dollar — are melted in Mexico City and recast into the object, then engraved with arabesques and the inscription plata o plomo, a phrase associated with cartel enforcement logics in Colombia. Currency becomes weapon. The border between institutional legality and criminal appropriation remains the object’s only stable feature.