Pedro Reyes

Pedro Reyes presents DISARM for the first time in Mexico, as the inaugural event of the new Center for Immersive Arts.

For nearly two decades, Pedro Reyes has transformed firearms into musical instruments. Under the title DISARM, pistols, rifles, and machine guns are converted into guitars, flutes, and mechanized installations that can be seen in action in this exhibition. The project exemplifies what the artist calls social sculpture: an artistic practice that seeks to move beyond the traditional aesthetic object in order to intervene in the social fabric and enable collective transformation.

The first effort in this direction was Palas por pistolas (Shovels for Guns) (2007) in Culiacán, Sinaloa, which emerged from a voluntary gun donation campaign. Through a series of television spots, the local population was invited to donate weapons. As a result, 1,527 firearms were collected, melted down, and transformed into 1,527 shovels, which were then used to plant 1,527 trees.

This initiative gave rise to a second project, DISARM, in which Reyes collaborated with musicians and blacksmiths to transform 7,000 weapons collected in Ciudad Juárez. Since then, the project has resulted in concerts in fifteen cities across five continents. Later, with the support of Alejandro Machorro and COCOLAB, the creation of Disarm (Mechanized)—the mechanized version of the installation—was made possible.

Also on view in this exhibition is Return to Sender (2020), created for the Tinguely Museum in Basel: a series of music boxes in which Reyes cut rifles from specific manufacturers. For example, a box made from Beretta rifles plays a fragment of Vivaldi, while another constructed from the barrels of Austrian Glock pistols reproduces a fragment of Mozart.

— Center for Immersive Arts, CAI