Every year, over 250,000 guns are smuggled into Mexico from the U.S. – in part thanks to the expiration of the U.S.’s assault weapons ban. The fact that there is only one gun store in Mexico also doesn’t help the situation. Pedro Reyes, a Mexican artist, is trying to change this by bringing attention to the problem in an artistic way. The artist isn’t only making art but literally making life and music from melted guns.
Reyes said:
I wanted to make a kind of protest. A large number of weapons have entered Mexican territory, 90% from the United States. I wanted to turn that around and call attention to the need to stop the flow of weapons to Mexico.
Reyes held a series of workshops and a performance at the University of South Florida in Tampa, using theater to encourage a discussion about guns called “Legislative Theater.” Legislative theater is a style of performance pioneered in Latin America in the 1960s to influence social change. Reyes called his project in Tampa “The Amendment to the Amendment.” Specifically, about the Second Amendment to the U.S Constitution which guarantees the right to bear arms. Reyes believes art should address social issues such as gun violence, even if they’re controversial.
Later, Reyes began another project to address the issue of gun violence but by actually using guns themselves. In 2007 in Culiacan Mexico, as part of a campaign to yield shootings, he collected 1,527 guns from residents and turned them into shovels to plant trees. He called this project “palas por pistolas” (shovels from pistols). “So for every gun now, there’s a shovel. And with every shovel, we planted a tree,” he said.
Inspired by the “palas por pistolas” project, Reyes started another project called “disarm” but instead of turning the guns into shovels he turned them into musical instruments instead. The artist had a lot of guns to create whatever he wanted thanks to a government agency in Mexico that gave Reyes 6,700 guns that had been confiscated from drug cartels and rendered inoperable. Since then, he’s been turning them into electric guitars, violins, flutes and percussion instruments.
With the help of his team Reyes was even able to utilize programs like Ableton Live, MIDI, and Max MSP to transform the guns into self-playing musical instruments. These programs make the instruments capable of performing music concerts with compositions prepared beforehand.
Reyes added:
I believe that the purpose of art is to come up with ways to transform the most negative instincts into creative instincts… I want my work to be useful for social and psychological transformation.
Reyes wanted people to understand that they could express their anger in a different way rather than killing – through music. “Rock and roll gives a certain degree of catharsis. Turning a machine gun into an electric guitar is a kind of transformation where you can still have a totemic object of power–an electric guitar has that kind of magical power and aura,” he explained. While the artist acknowledges that violence won’t just disappear, he hopes that art and music will remind people of alternatives.
Some of the instruments he has made include steel guitars made from 9 mm semiautomatic handguns, a saxophone made out of a gun barrel, a bass made from a double-barreled shotgun with curved magazines from AK-47 assault rifles and a marimba made from gun barrels which were cut to different lengths to play a musical scale. “You have these different notes, so you know, you can bang and say this is an A, this is a B, this is a C, depending on the length of the barrel.”
Reyes said:
Weapons are something that are praised in media as sexy and cool. If you play video games, or turn on the TV, or see any action film, it’s like a big advertisement all the time. People who have been victims of gun violence need opportunities to speak out and say that in real life, the effect that weapons have are disastrous.
Reyes hopes to shift the cultural acceptance of guns. He knows that it’s almost an impossible idea to turn that perspective around but believes it may be possible one day. Reyes suggests that it’s all a matter of cultural battle which he hopes art can be a contribution to. “There were things that were normal 50 years ago, like overt racism or discrimination against gay people, that we have seen start to change in our lifetime. I believe we should also change our perception of guns.”
If you are interested in checking out more info on Pedro Reyes’ work you can visit his website at Pedroreyes.net
