La representación de la utopía: Pedro Reyes y las estrategias de participación ciudadana

Abstract

The representation of utopia is a key to enabling the artist art building situations propitiatory tool for social change. In this respect, purposeful and playful project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) allow the public to interact with them both at the body as a conceptual and interpretative. We are in an art whose basic idea is to build up we experience. An art – as the artist set to be used-, slightly different concept of a useful art, so the artwork or piece work as a tool, a device, a tactic or a resource. Thus, the artist develops utopian architectural ideas and proposals that refer to a place that does not exist or whose existence is only temporary. By using simple means and casual settings, the artist com­bines utopia and function, fantasy and collective aspirations. His work operates by establishing a network of connections between the world of ideas, the people and the human collective, between the historical and formal. Here the modern city is becoming the new romantic landscape where modernity is a toolbox to work with and the crisis may be the fertilizer and the opportunity to completely new partnerships, which mixture can generate a vast catalog of different solutions. Some of their practices are in the field of neologism, covering the creation of new terms and con­cepts, as a way to open a new thought, with which the artist approaches the creation of new topias. It is ultimately adding stories to the world, action can be a weapon for peaceful change. In this sense, their art projects are based on the idea that it is possible to provide real solutions to social problems.