Taking direct action with Pedro Reyes in Santa Fe
April 10, 2023 – Santa Fe – by Aude Adrien
Pedro Reyes, MEMENTO (2023), recovered guns (image courtesy Daniel Quat)
In DIRECT ACTION, on view until May 1 at SITE: Santa Fe in New Mexico, Mexican artist Pedro Reyes invites us to reflect upon the role of art, not only as pure aesthetic research, but also as a tool for social change. The mere fact that the exhibition’s title is written in all caps makes it feel like a call to action directed at the viewer, urging us to not only watch the artist’s work, but also do our part. This feeling is immediately confirmed, upon entering the space, by the four concrete and steel statues called The Protestors, that celebrate all the ordinary citizens taking to the streets as an act of resistance.
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (The Protestors), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (Palas por Pistolas), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
A sculptor at heart and architect by training, Pedro Reyes was born and raised in Mexico, where he still lives – he is therefore all too familiar with the issues surrounding gun violence. DIRECT ACTION features many of his community projects related to disarmament: in most of them, Reyes turns guns from death tools into instruments of life. For MEMENTO, he collaborated with local NGOs fighting gun violence, as well as with the museum staff, local school students and a local educator to create one-of-a-kind flower vases, using decommissioned gun parts. For Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Guns), started in 2006, Reyes used a series of ads broadcasted on a local Mexican television station to ask community members to donate their weapons. He then melted the 1,527 guns he collected, and turned them into the same number of shovels. Those shovels were then donated to schools, who have to date planted more than 5,000 trees. Reyes insists on showing us how important it is to go full-circle, and how education and community engagement can amplify any given project’s impact – this is also illustrated by his longstanding campaign for the multiplication of lending libraries throughout Mexico (visitors are actually encouraged to borrow books from the one set up for this specific show).
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (Amendment and The People’s United Nations (pUN)), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
These beliefs explain as well why Reyes documented Amendment to the Amendment, a community-engaged event in Tampa, Florida in 2012. Students and faculty from South Florida University asked local participants to rewrite the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution – this amendment, which was adopted in 1791 to protect the right of individuals to bear firearms, has been at the center of the gun debate for years. The exhibition invites us into this challenging process, through a video recounting the discussions, the sculpture of a large hand delicately holding a pen, and a selection of the various iterations of the rewritten amendment. In another project called The People’s United Nations (pUN), Reyes imagined an alternative UN commission made of American citizens with connections, by birth or family, to each of the 193 countries that make up the UN. Over the course of a weekend, those citizen-delegates used games and role play to tackle some pressing issues, and Reyes documented the whole experience through paintings, videos, installations and sculptures. The artist strongly believes that activism only makes sense when it is part of a wider, collective initiative, that change can only happen through communication and group action.
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (The People’s United Nations (pUN)), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (Disarm Music Box, Machine Music and Versus Machina), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (Disarm (Mechanized)), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photo by Shayla Blatchford
Reyes also wants the viewer to interrogate the whole gun industry supply chain. For Disarm Music Box, he acquired gun parts directly from manufacturers, and used them, together with brass, to create three unique music boxes. Each of them, when activated, plays a piece by a composer originating from the country where the gun was manufactured: the box made out of Austrian Glock weapons plays a Mozart symphony, the one that used Beretta guns plays Vivaldi, and so on. Reyes is clearly asking the viewer: should the blame for gun deaths fall on the person who pulls the trigger, or does it start with the companies that made them? There is something chilling about the sound produced by those repurposed gun barrels. The viewer gets a similar impression when confronted to Disarm (Mechanized), whereby a group of musical instruments, made out of thousands of decommissioned firearms, mechanically performs programmed compositions. Reyes views the whole process of turning weapons into instruments as a form of exorcism, transmuting the lives that were actually taken by those guns – and the music that is being played does sound like a requiem.
Finally, Reyes takes his fight against the gun industry to another level in ZERO NUKES, a group of works pressing for nuclear disarmament. In Under the Cloud, a video commissioned by SITE: Santa Fe for the exhibition, he investigates the disastrous impact of the nuclear industry, particularly the storage of nuclear waste, on North American indigenous lands. He also uses a series of sculptures, multilingual banners and installations to address the governments of the most powerful nations and call for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. It is unclear what kind of impact Reyes’s call to actions can truly have on such monumental issues involving powerful lobbies and complex international politics. But it is heartwarming and empowering to see him try. All proceeds from the – mostly sold out – MEMENTO flower vases, made out of decommissioned gun parts, will go to local NGO Guns to Gardens to help fund new gun buyback programs. Reyes makes the question linger in your head when you exit the museum: when it comes to pressing social questions that affect millions of lives, what can art do? At the very least, his work is proof that art is an incredibly powerful tool to raise awareness. And after witnessing such commitment, you will be left to wonder how you can also contribute to the change he is advocating for.
Pedro Reyes, DIRECT ACTION, 2023, Installation view (ZERO NUKES), image courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, photos by Shayla Blatchford (above) and Aude Adrien (right)
Pedro Reyes: DIRECT ACTION
From February 3 to May 1, 2023
SITE: Santa Fe