HTTPS://WWW.TERRANULLIUS.GLOBAL      

HTTPS://WWW.TERRANULLIUS.GLOBAL is a digital repository that brings together more than five years of research conducted by Mexican researcher, artist, and community organizer Jerónimo Reyes-Retana in El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, Tamaulipas, Mexico. This marginalized fishing community endures social and environmental distress as it coexists, within the Mexico–US borderlands, alongside SpaceX’s launch port in Boca Chica, Texas, USA Sonic shock waves generated by SpaceX’s massive launch vehicles reverberate across the region; yet this corporate-driven phenomenon of transboundary sonic violence remains silenced and largely unaddressed by the regulatory agencies that authorize SpaceX’s activity in the area. In response, this digital space was conceived as a counter-archive, bringing together 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 power, is rendered as terra nullius: nobody’s land.

This online platform is currently under development and will be presented as part of Reyes-Retana’s individual exhibition at Museo Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City in Fall 2026.


Read More:

“For Coexistence in Resonance: In-between the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX Conundrum,” in Boomerangs of Empire, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), NYC, 2025.

“Underrepresentation and the Tropicalising of the Forensic Option,”in Ellipses: Journal for Creative Research, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, 2025.

“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.

“Playa Bagdad/SpaceX: Sound, Necropolitics, and the Industrialization of Space,” in Proceedings of the 10th xCoAx Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, Portugal, 2022.