Quantcast

Big Medium presents Jerónimo Reyes-Retana: "EPCOT - Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"

eventdetail
Photo courtesy of Jerónimo Reyes-Retana

The body of work presented in this exhibition is conceived as the first iteration of an ongoing field research process throughout the community of Playa Bagdad, located a few miles below the U.S.-Mexico border, on the shores of the Mexican Gulf. Up the shoreline, ten miles afar, lays SpaceX's launching facility of Boca Chica, where the space exploration enterprise is already performing the operational tasks needed to accomplish an ambitious agenda, including a 40,000 satellite-constellation floating in the low-Earth orbit and the colonization of Mars.

Given the nature of its location, Playa Bagdad, a precarious community with an economy reliant on the fishing industry, materializes the complexities inherent in the U.S.-Mexico border industrialization, resulting from international free trade agreements that have chosen remaining blind to the social asymmetries of neoliberal politics.

Nowadays, Playa Bagdad embodies a systemic contradiction. On the one hand, the community plays a protagonist role by standing in the front row to witness the mutation of a world economic order, in which space exploration promises the emergence of an economic zone delimited by a new dimension of geopolitical frontiers. On the other, Playa Bagdad is being systematically erased by the opaque and biased environmental impact protocols of SpaceX, which deliberately ignores the community's actual existence.

The body of work presented in this exhibition is conceived as the first iteration of an ongoing field research process throughout the community of Playa Bagdad, located a few miles below the U.S.-Mexico border, on the shores of the Mexican Gulf. Up the shoreline, ten miles afar, lays SpaceX's launching facility of Boca Chica, where the space exploration enterprise is already performing the operational tasks needed to accomplish an ambitious agenda, including a 40,000 satellite-constellation floating in the low-Earth orbit and the colonization of Mars.

Given the nature of its location, Playa Bagdad, a precarious community with an economy reliant on the fishing industry, materializes the complexities inherent in the U.S.-Mexico border industrialization, resulting from international free trade agreements that have chosen remaining blind to the social asymmetries of neoliberal politics.

Nowadays, Playa Bagdad embodies a systemic contradiction. On the one hand, the community plays a protagonist role by standing in the front row to witness the mutation of a world economic order, in which space exploration promises the emergence of an economic zone delimited by a new dimension of geopolitical frontiers. On the other, Playa Bagdad is being systematically erased by the opaque and biased environmental impact protocols of SpaceX, which deliberately ignores the community's actual existence.

The body of work presented in this exhibition is conceived as the first iteration of an ongoing field research process throughout the community of Playa Bagdad, located a few miles below the U.S.-Mexico border, on the shores of the Mexican Gulf. Up the shoreline, ten miles afar, lays SpaceX's launching facility of Boca Chica, where the space exploration enterprise is already performing the operational tasks needed to accomplish an ambitious agenda, including a 40,000 satellite-constellation floating in the low-Earth orbit and the colonization of Mars.

Given the nature of its location, Playa Bagdad, a precarious community with an economy reliant on the fishing industry, materializes the complexities inherent in the U.S.-Mexico border industrialization, resulting from international free trade agreements that have chosen remaining blind to the social asymmetries of neoliberal politics.

Nowadays, Playa Bagdad embodies a systemic contradiction. On the one hand, the community plays a protagonist role by standing in the front row to witness the mutation of a world economic order, in which space exploration promises the emergence of an economic zone delimited by a new dimension of geopolitical frontiers. On the other, Playa Bagdad is being systematically erased by the opaque and biased environmental impact protocols of SpaceX, which deliberately ignores the community's actual existence.

WHEN

WHERE

Big Medium
916 Springdale Rd.
Bldg 2, #101
Austin, TX 78702
https://www.bigmedium.org/epcot

TICKET INFO

Admission is free.
All events are subject to change due to weather or other concerns. Please check with the venue or organization to ensure an event is taking place as scheduled.
CULTUREMAP EMAILS ARE AWESOME
Get Austin intel delivered daily.