Pedro Reyes

Pedro Reyes seeks to develop critical discourses with his audience to produce works of art that invigorate social spaces. He has founded several spaces for temporary projects and creates works that involve public participation in large but ephemeral projects.

The work of Pedro Reyes touches on themes that interact between physical place and social space, making invisible geometry tangible in our personal relationships. His design projects that propose playful solutions to social problems include turning firearms into musical instruments, hosting the United Nations to address urgent issues, and offering ecological grasshopper burgers from a food cart.

Often viewers enlist as participants, either through individual conversations, therapeutic acts or as creators of objects in collaborative workshops.

His expansive notion of sculpture examines the cognitive contradictions of modern life, and the possibility of overcoming our particular crises by increasing our degree of individual and collective agency. Thus Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organization to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness and humor.

This video shows the result of the collaboration between Mexican artist @_pedro_reyes_ and the Mexican percussion ensemble Tambuco during Reyes’ fourth individual exhibition at LABOR, “Music for Litophones” in 2018.

For this project,Tambuco made a series of presentations at LABOR in which they played a composition made expressly by Ricardo Gallardo, completing the co-creative process of these works, coming to life with sound and generating a musical discourse. It is not the first time that Pedro Reyes makes musical sculptures made with unexpected materials, as is the case of “Disarm” (2012), where he transformed firearms into instruments, or “Satori” (2016) where he worked with Balinese gongs percussed by mechanized drumsticks. These two slopes; the sculpture in stone and the production of instruments, converge in this exploration of the lithophones.