HTTPS://WWW.TERRANULLIUS.GLOBAL      

HTTPS://WWW.TERRANULLIUS.GLOBAL is an extension of artist and researcher Jerónimo Reyes-Retana’s community-driven investigation in El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, Tamaulipas, Mexico. This marginalized fishing community faces social and environmental distress as it coexists in the Mexico-US borderlands with SpaceX’s launch port in Boca Chica, Texas, US. Acoustic shockwaves from SpaceX’s massive launchers disrupt the area, yet this corporate-driven phenomenon of transboundary sonic violence remains silenced and overlooked by regulatory agencies. Reyes-Retana conceived this digital space as a counter-archive, gathering visual and sonic records of SpaceX’s activity, collected by residents living and working in Playa Bagdad—a systemically invisibilized community that, in the eyes of those in power, is perceived as Terra Nullius—nobody’s land.

Read More:
“Playa Bagdad/SpaceX: Transboundary Sonic Violence, the Colonial Voids of Infrastructure, and Counter-Archiving as a Place-Making Practice,” in Making Space, Making Place: Marking the Americas, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), NYC, 2024.