[4][5] After studying Architecture, Reyes founded "Torre De Los Vientos", an experimental project space in Mexico City which operated from 1996-2002.
In 2016, he was visiting lecturer at MIT's Art, Culture and Technology program[6] where he co-taught the course The Reverse Engineering of Warfare: Challenging Techno-optimism and Reimagining the Defense Sector (an Opera for the End of Times)” in conjunction with Carla Fernández.
Keeping in mind how the shovels in "Palas Por Pistolas" had brought people together, Reyes decided to use the guns and their parts to create musical instruments.
Brought to Brooklyn in 2011 with the Guggenheim's support, Sanatorium is a utopian clinic of topical treatments for those inner-city afflictions we are all too familiar with: stress, loneliness and hyper-stimulation.
[24] Balancing reality and fiction, Sanatorium draws from Gestalt psychology, theater warm-up exercises, Fluxus events, conflict resolution techniques, trust-building games, corporate coaching, psychodrama, and hypnosis.
In 2012, Sanatorium has been presented in DOCUMENTA (13),[25] the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013, Toronto's The Power Plant in 2014, ICA Miami, CAM St Louis, and OCA São Paulo in 2015. pUN is an experimental conference in which regular citizens act as delegates for each of the countries in the UN and seek to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art, and conflict resolution to geopolitics.
The first happened in 2013 at Casa do Vidro in São Paulo, where a small snack cart offered visitors a Brazilian street food specialty: giant ants.
As an alternative to the ubiquitous fast-food staple, the beef hamburger, Reyes created the Grasswhopper, a burger with a patty made of crickets, a common snack in southern Mexico.
[26] Written by playwright Paul Hufker, The show was performed Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights at timed intervals from 6 p.m. to midnight, from 7 October through Halloween until 7 December 2016 right after the 2016 US presidential election.
This immersive installation combined both ideas of Halloween and the 2016 US presidential election to create a haunted house of sorts discussing the current political landscape.
The Brooklyn Army terminal was once the largest military supply base in the United States which makes it the perfect backdrop for the exhibition especially at night.
Reyes’ puppet plays include The Permanent Revolution (2014) on the life of Leon Trotsky and other political satires featuring key figures in the history of philosophy, such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith.
In Manufacturing Mischief, the character of Noam Chomsky finds an antagonist in Ayn Rand, who has never been taken seriously in academia, yet continues to be read widely and is a source of ideologies associated with Trumpism.
These and other characters are brought into the play, written by playwright Paul Hufker, by a Deus ex machina called the Print-A-Friend, an apparatus where a book is put in and out comes the author.
The following months, it will be staged at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, The Tank in New York City, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Serpentine Galleries in London.
For this project, the Mexican percussion ensemble Tambuco will make a series of presentations in which they will play a composition made expressly by Ricardo Gallardo.
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.