Pedro Reyes’s Disarmament Practice Becomes a Sound Installation in Bergamo

On February 28 at 11:00, CULT! Sala dell’Orologio at Palazzo Libertà in Bergamo will host a looped audiovisual display of Pedro Reyes’s “Sounds of Disarm,” part of the Blackboard project curated by Francesca Ceccherini in collaboration with Lab 80 film. The installation draws from a selection of the artist’s archive of tracks, recordings, and sound documentation linked to his disarmament practice, collected over years across various geographic contexts. Reyes began his “disarm” practice in 2007, converting 1,527 weapons into shovels to plant trees in Culiacán, Mexico, in the ongoing work “Palas por Pistolas.” He has since collected over 7,000 weapons, transforming them into “instruments of life” and musical instruments—string, wind, and percussion—played worldwide by musicians and performers who compose dedicated scores. These instruments have been used at non-violence demonstrations and March for Our Lives, often activated through mechanical orchestrations. Ceccherini notes the practice denounces violence and the global rearmament agenda while demonstrating a possible transformation of matter from death to life, turning a killing object into one that produces music, resonance, vibration, and sociality. Palazzo Libertà, a rationalist building from the late 1930s originally called Casa Littoria, was renamed after the Liberation and has been undergoing major renovation since November, with Blackboard aiming to rewrite the site’s memory.