palas por pistolas

Artist Pedro Reyes melts down the guns of Mexican city Culliacan and uses the scrap metal into gardening tools as an anti-violence campaign:

Carolee Thea: How did Palas Por Pistolas come about?

Pedro Reyes: I was invited to do Palas Por Pistolas for the botanical garden in Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with the highest number of gun deaths in the country. The gardens are beautiful and bucolic, considered the best collection of tropical plants in the Americas, but outside the walls, violence prevails. My project tried to bridge the two worlds. My initial step was to organize a campaign in cooperation with the city government—collecting weapons and melting the metal into shovels that would later be used to plant trees in the city and beyond. It’s like a transmutation of metal motivated by the social design embedded in the process of removing the weapons from circulation—like agents of death turned into agents of life. I want to believe that by taking 1,500 arms out of circulation we might save a few lives, but the real purpose of the piece is to add a story to the world, so in other cities they will say, “In Culiacán, they did that. ”