He collected 1,527 guns, melted them down and turned them into an equal number of spades for planting trees. This is one of the works by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who wanted to shine a spotlight on the problem of the spread of firearms in Mexico.

The debate over the growing number of deaths by firearm continues to rage, particularly in the United States of America, following incidents that have occurred in recent months. The United States remains the country with the highest number of deaths from shootings or related to firearms (see the chart and data up to 2013).

Spades instead of weapons

The project is called Palas pro Pistolas (spades for guns) and was launched in 2008 in Culiacán, one of the Mexican cities with the highest rate of firearm deaths. There, an intensive media campaign invited residents to voluntarily donate their weapons in exchange for coupons to purchase household appliances and electronic devices.

Thanks to this campaign the artist collected more than a thousand weapons, many of them automatic and of military origin, literally crushed them with a roller and took them to a foundry where they were transformed into spades. "The pedagogical purpose was to show how an agent of death can become an agent of life," Reyes declared.

Many of the spades were then handed over to schools and institutions, where they were used by students and adults to plant new trees. The spades have been displayed in dedicated exhibitions, from Paris to San Francisco, from Vancouver to Denver. But that is not all: the artist also used weapons confiscated by the government to make musical instruments, because, as he himself explains, "music is the exact opposite of weapons."