The Playa Bagdad/SpaceX Conundrum: The Workshop for Spatial Investigation

Initiator(s)

Jerónimo Reyes-Retana, Ana Cerino

Description

The Workshop for Spatial Investigation (WIP) is a schoolhouse in El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, at the easternmost edge of the Mexico–US borderlands.
Developed after more than six years of collaborative research and community engagement, WIP was conceived as a public and educational space for listening to the concerns and desires of the people who live and work in Playa Bagdad, responding to the asymmetrical impact of SpaceX rocket launches and the transboundary sonic violence experienced by them. To achieve this, artists' role is that of facilitator and co-conspirator, thinking together with participants in complicity.
Since 2023, the artist in collaboration with Ana Cerino, a local educator and community organizer, have led informational sessions at the public elementary school, engaging more than 200 participants and addressing inconsistencies in U.S. Federal Aviation Administration environmental assessments authorizing SpaceX operations. A core group of 15 residents meets weekly to sustain the program. On increasingly frequent launch days, public workshops on sound and video recording are held using the artist’s equipment.

Context

El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad is a marginalized settlement with a population of approximately 1,500 inhabitants who make a living by fishing in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and cultivating oysters along the banks of the Río Bravo/Grande, which marks the contested geopolitical boundary between Mexico and the United States. Within this context of geopolitical and epistemological confluence, the community of Playa Bagdad now faces a new layer of complexity: SpaceX’s spaceport, known as Starbase, lies only four kilometers north of the river. At Starbase, SpaceX has been testing the largest rocket ever built, known as Starship/Super Heavy—a vehicle intended to colonize Mars by 2030, according to SpaceX.

Goals

It would be naive and inaccurate to say that the purpose of the WIP is to stop SpaceX’s operations in the region, as these operations are part of an infrastructural development project that aims to inaugurate a new chapter of outer-space industrialization—one of interplanetary proportions.
The goal, therefore, is to implement critical pedagogies through mediation technologies—computers, Internet, cameras, and sound recorders—to counter-register the locality’s changing soundscape and landscape.
A core ambition is an inflatable planetarium, usually used to glorify science and technological progress, here subverted into an open forum for listening to the anxieties and desires of sharing land with SpaceX.

Beneficial outcomes

The program’s contingent pedagogies have provided adult participants with language and conceptual tools to identify and articulate the inconsistencies in the environmental impact assessments that allowed SpaceX to operate, that deliberately erased the existence of the community of Playa Bagdad, reproducing the colonial logics of erasure.
It created the community’s only free-access internetsite, making WIP a public educational initiative where local youth meet for workshops in digital literacy and media-arts as tools for counter-investigation.
Its outcomes include support from international organizations, and Greenpeace Mexico’s recent request for collaboration, recognizing WIP’s access to a hermetic community shaped by the necropolitical regimes of the Mexico–U.S. borderlands.
WIP bridges institutional support from Fundación Jumex with residents’ trust and generosity: the community donated the land where the schoolhouse was built. Therefore, WIP is theirs.

Location

Mexico - US Border

Field

Activism, Civic Action, Decolonization, Contingent Pedagogies, Enviromental Justice

Strategy

Extraterritorial Reciprocity, Artworlds (art-sustaining environtments), Specific visibility

Users

Jerónimo Reyes-Retana, Ana Cerino; the 200 participants who have engaged in the informational sessions, residents and participants in the public workshops and activities; international institutions and organizations that advocate for enviromental and social justice.

Maintained by

Jerónimo Reyes-Retana, Ana Cerino, Jumex Foundation, Residents who have donated the land.

Duration

2023-ongoing

Category

Scientific
Pedagogical
Politics
Urban Development
Economy
Environment
Social

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