A Glimpse at the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum
In 2014, SpaceX began building its spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas, just four kilometres from the Rio Grande delta, which marks both the beginning and end of the territories governed by Mexico and the United States. Since then, the borderlands in the region have taken on a new significance. The Mexico–U.S. border, particularly the point of confluence where the waters of the Rio Grande meet those of the Gulf of Mexico, acquired a multidimensional character shaped by intricate tensions. Manufacturing industries along the Mexican borderlands exploit the availability of cheap labour. This factor, together with the numerous ports of entry that facilitate a thriving licit and illicit exchange between Mexico and the United States, render this region one of the most complex geopolitical frontiers of our time. Consequently, this 3,145-kilometre-long geopolitical fringe has produced sites where the convergence of multiple forms of violence—including environmental—renders this transcontinental buffer zone a nerve centre for scrutinising the taxonomy of modern, colonial, global designs (Hernández 2018).
In this context, the asymmetrical nature of neoliberal geopolitical models is amplified by the monolithic presence of SpaceX. This private enterprise—founded and directed by Elon Musk, the wealthiest individual on Earth—spearheads a new chapter of outer space industrialisation that must be examined through a multifocal lens capable of revealing the nuances of its agenda. Beyond its strong and controversial ties to the U.S. government and military, SpaceX’s project is not intended to serve the interests of the many, but rather to construct the infrastructure necessary to extend capitalist networks into outer space. The concept of infrastructure, with its multiple implications, stands here as a hyperobject—a phenomenon so vast and entangled that it demands alternative forms of representation to expose its dual nature: while it connects, moves, and liberates, it also disconnects, constrains, and subjugates (Cupers 2021).
With the arrival of SpaceX in the region and the development of a spaceport intended to become its main operations hub (Starbase), the eastern corner of the US-Mexico border has solidified into an even more complex site where conflicting ideologies, beliefs and traditions converge. Through explosions and implosions, this convergence opens the way for alternative perspectives and, consequently, new forms of representation and interpretation (Anzaldúa 2015). Starbase’s coexistence with the marginalised and systemically erased settlement of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad [the fishing field of Playa Bagdad], located on the Mexican side of the border, provides fertile terrain for critical analysis and demands the implementation of contingent and relational strategies for research and representation.
In this geopolitical context, which entails inhabiting a shared ecological zone, SpaceX is the source of different kinds of concern. However, as an artist, researcher and community organiser whose practice examines political underrepresentation and practices of erasure in Latin America, my direct engagement is not with SpaceX, but with the community of Playa Bagdad—as it is colloquially known. Through implementing critical forms that engage with aesthetic practices, I am interested in scrutinising the environmental and cultural impact in Playa Bagdad caused by the sonic shock waves produced by massive SpaceX rockets during liftoffs and test operations. This is a case of geopolitical and environmental negligence that I have termed ‘transboundary sonic violence’—a case that, paradoxically, remains silent.
Decoloniality: Listening in Resonance
For over five years, my practice has traced the unfolding of Starbase in relation to the fishing community of Playa Bagdad through field and community work that is grounded in situated and relational methodologies for conducting research. When I first set foot on the site, SpaceX was testing an awkwardly shaped vessel that was far from the monumental, phallic form it would eventually assume. Today, SpaceX is testing a rocket that stands 120 metres tall. From the moment construction began on this spacecraft—hailed not only as the largest ever built but also as the vehicle appointed to colonise Mars—it became a visual and sonic intruder in the environmental and political reality of Playa Bagdad. The community is now compelled to live beneath a renewed, though recursive, colonial horizon.
The environmental, cultural and geopolitical implications of this mutation in the land and soundscape of Playa Bagdad made it clear that examining this unique case of social and environmental injustice would require a granular, critically attuned analytical framework—one capable of identifying and articulating the multiple tensions rooted in Latin America’s colonial legacy. Such a perspective would enable a multifocal and proactive approach, moving beyond the singular epistemological trajectory imposed by what sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1992) termed the ‘coloniality of power’, or simply ‘coloniality’, in his seminal article ‘Coloniality, Modernity/Rationality’ (Quijano 1992). By introducing this concept, Quijano—a key figure in the genealogy of thinkers central to the development of decolonial thought in Latin America and the Caribbean—opened new ground for cultivating deeper examination of the underlying logics of Western domination in the territories now known as Latin America.
A core aspect of Quijano’s framework is the distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism refers to the geopolitical brutality of imperial European expansionism, beginning in the fifteenth century with the so-called ‘discovery of America’—a moment that marked the onset of transatlantic trade routes and the emergence of global capitalist networks of extraction and distribution. Coloniality, by contrast, names the persistence of the economic, political, social and, crucially, epistemic structures of Western1 domination, long after the formal end of colonial rule in the nineteenth century. In other words, coloniality underscores the fact that although independence movements in Latin America succeeded in expelling imperial powers, the foundational logics and institutions of colonial power remain intact.
Additionally, in ‘Coloniality, Modernity/Rationality’, Quijano (2024) introduces the constitutive relationship between modernity2 and coloniality—later describing them as ‘two sides of the same coin, two inseparable dimensions of a single historical process’ (Quijano 2024, p. 219). This binomial and mutually constitutive relationship became central to the development of decoloniality as a transdisciplinary analytical framework. Semiotician Walter D. Mignolo—also a close collaborator of Quijano and one of the principal architects of decoloniality—foregrounds this relationship by showing how modernity functions as an epistemological trajectory that promises salvation, progress, civilization and development, while simultaneously concealing how coloniality—as articulated by Quijano—constitutes a mesh of power sustained by three enduring forces: domination, exploitation, and conflict (Mignolo 2024).
In ‘Politics of a Decolonial Investigation’, Mignolo (2023) insists that this paradox must remain in sharp focus when investigating instances of systemic violence (Mignolo 2023). In Playa Bagdad’s confrontation with SpaceX, and given the implications of the latter’s agenda, this conundrum crystallises in the persistent juxtaposition of coloniality’s still-active dynamics within a shared zone marked by asymmetrical forms of both hyper- and under-representation. While the relentless roar of SpaceX’s rockets—carrying across more than forty kilometres—drowns the horizon with acoustic shock waves, the voices of Playa Bagdad’s residents are muted into political silence. Here, the asymmetrical dynamics of coloniality reverberate not as relics of the past, but as active forces shaping a contested present and an alarming future.
Over three decades later, thinkers and practitioners from Latin America and the Caribbean—including myself—continue to move within and across a lineage of thinkers3 who, since the early twentieth century, have contributed to the emergence of decolonial synergies, including decoloniality. In these movements, alternative ways of knowing—and sensing—emerge from the commitment to delink from the totalising and homogenising narratives of the West, embracing instead the pluriversal: a celebration of difference (Escobar 2018). In resonance with this orientation, decoloniality—as pedagogue Catherine E. Walsh (2023) evocatively argues—is not a point of enlightenment or a univocal truth, but a framework for nurturing forms of critical praxis committed to the struggle of making space for new political imaginaries that unsettle the structures of dominant discourse (Walsh, 2023).
To destabilise modern, colonial, global designs, however, it is first necessary to identify their foundational pillars, hidden layers and concealed violences. In this regard, Quijano’s second foundational concept, ‘the colonial matrix of power’ is key. Further developed by Mignolo, this framework provides a means to map the interlocking economic, political, social and epistemic domains through which coloniality persists. Mignolo (2023)—alongside María Lugones, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and others—has systematised the matrix into a conceptual technology for dissecting the taxonomy of coloniality, revealing how its domains are mutually sustaining and interdependently operative (Mignolo 2023).
Viewed through the multifocal lens of the colonial matrix of power—which exposes the persistence of epistemological grids of domination—the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum comes into sharp relief. Here, social and environmental violence converge with borderland geopolitics, mirroring the normalised violence shaping Mexico’s northern frontier. Philosopher Sayak Valencia, in Gore Capitalism (2018), offers an incisive reading of such dynamics (Valencia 2018). Raised in Tijuana, one of Mexico’s most complex border cities, Valencia examines how the global economy in the borderlands operates alongside necropolitical regimes that confront sublime notions of progress (Valencia 2018). Her work reveals how Western organisational systems depend on interwoven power relations that have transformed Mexico’s northern border—and, by extension, Playa Bagdad—into sites of cultural, economic and political experimentation. The borderlands thus emerge as a laboratory epitomising what sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (2004), a close collaborator of Quijano, defines in terms of world-systems theory as the periphery: territories structurally designed for exploitation in the service of hegemonic interests (Wallerstein 2004).
From this stance, as a researcher and artist investigating social and environmental injustices in Latin America—particularly those linked to systems of truth production that facilitate industrialisation and infrastructural expansion, as in the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum—I approach the colonial matrix of power primarily through the domain of epistemology, where aesthetics and representation take centre stage. Examining this domain reveals how knowledge is produced and administered under false claims of neutrality, propelled by salvationist narratives that have historically positioned the Eurocentric worldview as the locus of enunciation—what philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2005) terms ‘the hubris of the zero point’ Castro-Gómez 2005). This is why one of decoloniality’s central impulses rests on what Mignolo (2009) calls ‘epistemic disobedience’: a call to liberate knowledge production in the Third World from Eurocentric genealogies shaped by inquiries and tensions that, though regionally and ethnically specific, are framed as universal rationality. Exerting this epistemological impulse remains crucial for moving into hybrid trajectories of knowledge production and representation that, rather than seeking conventional syncretism, strive to conjure subversive complicity (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007). These processes prioritise subaltern subjectivities as a means for listening in resonance.
Aesthetics, Research, and Represen(tension)
Representation has long been the subject of intense debate across various academic disciplines—particularly within the social sciences and the humanities, where the violences of coloniality linger in the very tools of inquiry. Yet from this turbulence, something generative has emerged: an urgency to reprogram the gaze through which cultures and civilisations—especially those located within or beyond the margins of Western epistemology—are studied from a distance. This gaze has too often been reduced, objectified and silenced (Spivak 1988; Haraway 1988).
In this spirit of refusal and reimagining, the work of Māori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) —and her seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies—opens up alternative forms of engagement not only with the concept of research, but also with the act of conducting research from the margins—an act that carries both tensions and ethical responsibilities (Smith 1999). For Smith, research is never neutral; it is always a ‘dirty word’, burdened with the weight of histories spoken for, extracted from and erased (Smith 1999, p. 1). Yet within that word, she also traces pathways to other possibilities—for turning inquiry inward, for rooting knowledge in relation, for imagining otherwise. Importantly, Smith reminds us that for researchers committed to this endeavour, these tensions should not be viewed as obstacles, but rather as generative forces for reprogramming dominant modes of representation and, therefore, the very foundations of knowledge production.
Sociologist Rolando Vázquez (2020), in Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary, explores how to navigate the tensions of representation by fostering forms of aesthetic engagement freed from the exclusionary imperatives of the modern/colonial gaze—a gaze that claims moral authority and superiority over non-Western bodies, cultures and beliefs (Vázquez 2020). Central to this vision is the concept of decolonial aesthesis, introduced by Walter Mignolo (2010), which departs from the Kantian view of aesthetics as a field bound to one-dimensional paradigms of beauty and the sublime (Mignolo 2010). This framework, as outlined by Mignolo, was shaped in the eighteenth century and preceded by the ideas of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who is credited with founding modern aesthetics. It aligned aesthetic judgment with the arts as a domain governed by moral codes rooted in Eurocentric criteria of beauty and taste. Decolonial aesthesis challenges this legacy, creating space for plural ways of sensing, representing and interpreting beyond Western prescriptions.
In response, and through a semiotic lens, Mignolo revisits the etymological origin of aesthetics, which is rooted in the term aesthesis. This ancient Greek concept was not originally used to define the epistemological study of beautification. Rather, aesthesis referred to that which pertains to the senses—it denoted the perceptual processes involved in sensing and sense-making. Here, sensing refers to the capacity to perceive or be affected by sensorial stimuli, while sense-making denotes the ability to translate such perception into forms of knowledge. In this way, decolonial aesthesis gives rise to experiential configurations in which art can function as a critical vehicle for enabling heterogeneous modes of representation and interpretation, creating a space where multiple forms of subjectivity can coexist. From the perspective of decolonial aesthesis, the motivations of artistic praxis are not rooted in beautification; Instead, they are driven by the questions that sustain decoloniality as a relational force that examines ‘what has been erased through genocide, exploitation, denigration or extraction.’ (Vázquez 2020, p. 58).
As Vázquez emphasises, processes of cultural, historical and political interrogation that function through critical modalities of representation, such as decoloniality and decolonial aesthesis, rely on listening rather than speaking on behalf of others. This simple yet powerful call resonates deeply with my own practice as an artist and researcher working alongside communities and within territories that, besides not being my own, are often regarded as peripheral or as ‘extractive zones’. Scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) uses this term to describe sites predisposed to the violence through which ‘capitalism… reduce[s], constrain[s], and convert[s] life into commodities,’ and also to the ‘epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems’ (Gómez-Barris 2017, xix).
Attentive listening to the unheard voices of Playa Bagdad—situated within a systemically erased territoriality—has remained at the core of this research, which I have conducted through methodologies grounded in contingency, relationality and reflexivity. This practice has served as a guiding force in the co-creation of methodologies and strategies that render the often-contentious notion of research, generative rather than extractive, allowing it to crystallise into disobedient forms of literary and aesthetic representation. For this reason, I employ the first-person ‘I’ as a deliberate discursive tool. On one hand, this choice creates space to share episodes and anecdotes that have been pivotal in shaping a multifocal, critical and more intimate perspective on the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum. On the other hand, the use of ‘I’ serves as a continual reminder that acknowledging one’s positionality as a researcher is essential when engaging in knowledge production across social and epistemic divides. This acknowledgement is necessary for cultivating the conditions of epistemic hybridity required to think and act between dissonant realities.
In resonance with Catherine Walsh’s (2023) rendering of ‘the critical’—an evocation I foreground in the previous section—my engagement with the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum unfolds through modes of inquiry that resist disciplinary containment, aiming not to produce definitive descriptions but to open space for alternative interpretations. This transdisciplinary approach seeks to unsettle the compartmentalised architectures of Western knowledge. It is driven less by certainty than by the possibility of crafting shared spaces for reflecting on the environmental and political consequences of living beneath the renewed colonial horizon cast by SpaceX’s launch port. By refusing the rigidities of conventional ethnography, the framework of analysis proposed in this investigation responds contingently to the polymorphic, contradictory nature of its context, demanding disobedient forms of engagement. The dialogue among different modalities of critical aesthetic practice operates here as a generative force, activating alternate modes of sensing and sense-making to address a particularly elusive case of transboundary sonic violence. Registration, or, more precisely, counter-registration, unfolds through the hybridisation of aesthetic frameworks equipped to render forms of underrepresentation visible. These forms include: decoloniality, which I have already deployed, and a forensic approach to the arts, whose conceptual boundaries this text will further explore.
Starbase: An Epicentre of Sonic Transboundary Violence
As mentioned previously, Starbase serves as the testing ground for the Starship/Superheavy launcher. Standing as tall as a seventy-story building, this rocket has been framed as marking a ‘new era of space exploration’ when, in fact, it signals the onset of a new phase of outer space industrialisation. As the terrestrial infrastructure enabling a renewed space race, and given the environmental damage already taking place, Starbase exemplifies how projects of this magnitude often advance at the expense of marginalised communities and fragile ecosystems, under the guise of development and progress (Appel, Gupta and Anand 2018). Beyond transforming the land and soundscape of Playa Bagdad, and in resonance with Brian Larkin’s (2013) reflections in his article ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’ (Larkin 2013), SpaceX’s agenda underscores how infrastructure carrying deep cultural and geopolitical implications can determine the sequential trajectory of history. This trajectory points toward a colonial horizon in outer space; a future no longer speculative but imminent.
Central to SpaceX’s vision, the Starship/Superheavy system is designed both to serve as the vessel for colonising Mars, and to enable the large-scale deployment of Starlink, a vast constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. Now exceeding 8,000 units—with approval for 30,000 more—Starlink is promoted under the guise of ‘democratising’ internet access, a rhetoric masking the consolidation of planetary-scale infrastructure that centralises control over data. Far from bridging divides, it deepens economic and political asymmetries between those with the means to access the dark skies and those without. In this scenario, the so-called Third World remains a client and dependent, its resources feeding the expanding apparatus of coloniality in an age where control of information equates to political power. Simultaneously, SpaceX is advancing Starshield, a Starlink-like network with exclusive capabilities for the U.S. military. This is one of several controversial projects entwined with the Starship/Superheavy program.
To realise its ambitious agenda, the Starship/Superheavy program demands an exceptionally high launch cadence—an escalation already in motion. On 26 May 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration approved SpaceX’s request to increase annual launches from eight to 25, with 20 authorised landings. This expansion is only the beginning. In 2024, at a conference near Playa Bagdad organised by Mexican authorities to promote local support for SpaceX’s operations, I witnessed Starbase general manager Katheryn Lueders address the audience. The company enjoys strong backing from local officials, who envision its presence as a catalyst for tourism. During her talk, Lueders recounted hearing ‘Elon’—as she called him—predict that SpaceX would soon conduct at least one launch per day. More than a bold projection, this statement was a revealing warning, exposing the profound and imminent threat this launch frequency poses to the ecological and cultural survival of Playa Bagdad.
At each launch of the Starship/Superheavy, a cluster of 33 Raptor engines ignites simultaneously, lifting the colossal spacecraft off the ground and producing a deafening roar that, for some, symbolises progress and development. For the residents of Playa Bagdad, however, this sound evokes uncertainty and concern. Each launch generates acoustic shock waves that reach nearly 194 dB—the maximum sound intensity possible under Earth’s atmospheric conditions. According to the Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction (PARTNER), sound at this level can seriously impact human health in numerous ways. These include impairing cognition and basic bodily functions—while also disrupting ecosystems and compromising structural integrity.4
The damaging effects of mechanical vibrations transmitted through the atmosphere as sonic waves have been examined across disciplines by thinkers such as artist-researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan, philosophers Steve Goodman and Cecile Malaspina and anthropologist-writer Marina Peterson. While their approaches emerge from distinct perspectives, their work shares a common impulse: to investigate how human and non-human entities respond to sonic exposure that, in various ways, enacts violence. These ideas, among others, have informed my own practice and the development of a framework for engaging with the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum. This framework treats noise (understood as an unwanted signal) as an instrument of cultural, environmental and geopolitical analysis.
It is crucial to foreground the fact that the residents of Playa Bagdad remain distant from these conversations and dangerously close to a source of disruption that generates sonic shock waves capable of shaking the ground like an earthquake. Their economy, reliant on fishing in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and collecting oysters along the banks of the Rio Bravo/Grande River, is now exposed to acoustic forces potent enough to resonate through the soil and to cross the Mexico–U.S. border. These acoustic forces manifest as a violent energy that rattles the vernacular and precarious architecture of Playa Bagdad—shock waves that also penetrate the human body and unsettle local wildlife. This reality remains unacknowledged by both SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration, as Playa Bagdad is conspicuously absent from all environmental assessments authorising the corporation’s operations in the region—initially published in 2014 and subsequently revised and updated on multiple occasions. As such, Playa Bagdad exists as a colonial void. The settlement is cartographically erased to make way for the expansion of a key infrastructure project that is poised to play a central role in how the global designs of modernity/coloniality continue to solidify into a recursive and dire interplanetary reality (Reyes-Retana 2023).
The emerging case of transboundary sonic violence at Playa Bagdad caused by SpaceX’s activities is unprecedented, as the intricate history of the Mexico–U.S. borderlands has never witnessed a jurisdictional violation of this kind. As noted earlier, this geographical fringe is a site where multifarious and complex forms of violence coalesce. Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) evocatively articulated this condition in Borderlands/La Frontera: La Nueva Mestiza , a foundational work in the unfolding of decolonial thought (Anzaldúa 1987). She describes the Mexico–U.S. borderlands as an herida abierta: ‘an open wound where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds; and before a scab can form, it hemorrhages again’ (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 3). This poetic and political depiction underscores how the Mexico–U.S. borderlands, and, by extension, Playa Bagdad, are sites shaped by cultural, economic and political frictions, demanding contingent and hybrid forms of representation. The urgency intensifies when the phenomenon in question is a corporate-made form of transboundary sonic violence that resists tangibility and thus evades systemic accountability.
Not a Forensic Turn, an Option
Since the democratisation of photography and film, the uneasy dance between the aestheticisation of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics—as signalled by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, a touchstone for critical media practices—has continued to unfold. Along this trajectory, the evolving tools of mediation, shaped by technological advancements, have opened pathways for new forms of aesthetic representation. This, in turn, has encouraged the development of new forms of art devoted to crafting dissident narratives that bear witness to, and contend with, the shifting geometries of systemic violence. With the advent of mechanical reproduction in the service of representation, the connections between research-based processes and art solidified (Steyerl 2010; Bishop 2023). As philosopher of technology Yuk Hui observes, new forms of using media and technology for art-making emerged, driven by the desire to illuminate the cast shadows of power and the darkness that lies beyond the enlightened boundaries of rationality (Hui 2021).
To sequentially represent this shift, I look to the work of Soviet Factography, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Gustavo Solanas and Octavio Getino, the Black Audio Film Collective, Renée Green, Critical Art Ensemble, Harun Farocki and Forensic Architecture, among others, as foundational references for examining the epistemological entanglements between art and research. This lineage, in my view, evocatively traces alternative and transdisciplinary pathways for amplifying the visibility of systemic violence and underrepresentation. This manifests through the recollection, articulation and analysis of documents, testimonies, information, and data materials that operate simultaneously as evidence and as poetic and political artefacts. Along this trajectory, I situate what I call the ‘forensic option’.
To develop this concept, I use ‘option’ as a generative gesture, deliberately avoiding ‘turn’, which carries connotations tied to paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production within Western epistemological grids. I make this distinction in resonance with Mignolo, who frames decoloniality not as a turn but as an option (Mignolo 2023). As such, my analysis is grounded in the premise that artmaking and art thinking do not possess a univocal form, as is often assumed. I contend that artistic practices emerging from research-based processes that examine the reciprocal relationship between aesthetics and politics require analytical frameworks capable of addressing the endemic tensions within the sites, communities and territorialities where the violences of coloniality are enacted. Such places often persist under the veil of the ‘Third World’, a category that is synonymous with political underrepresentation.
Additionally, in developing the notion of the forensic option, I find it imperative to reflect on the work of architect, activist and theorist Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture—the renowned research agency housed within the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The emergence of Forensic Architecture marked a new chapter in artmaking and art thinking, grounded in transdisciplinary, research-based processes committed to social and environmental justice and the defense of human rights. As it is not my intention here to examine in detail the nuances of Weizman’s extensive and transformative contributions to the ongoing convergence of aesthetics, technology, media and politics, I will instead underscore the foundational conceptual principles of Forensic Architecture’s approach to expanding aesthetic practice in service of such causes.
As Weizman (2017) provocatively frames it in Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, cases of social violence and environmental injustice perpetrated by state agencies or corporations are articulated through diverse vectors that connect multiple dimensions of existence—spatial, societal, political and environmental (Weizman 2017). For this reason, such cases warrant scrutiny through a range of disciplinary lenses, including those within the realm of the arts. Weizman further emphasises that addressing systemic violations can benefit from bridging aesthetic practices with the counter-implementation of analytical frameworks drawn from forensic sciences, whose foundational principle holds that every action leaves a trace.
When discussing counter-implementation, Weizman emphasises that examination through the lens of forensic science involves meticulous processes of data collection, followed by analysis using scientific methods, advanced technologies and specialised techniques of 3D representation. He also underscores that access to forensic technologies has historically been monopolised by the police and the military—both key actors in sustaining regimes of surveillance and control through coercive means. Building on this premise, the work of Weizman and Forensic Architecture has been instrumental in developing both conceptual provocations and practical methodologies aimed at reversing the forensic gaze—one that has long been weaponised against individuals and communities whose very existence obstructs extractive, genocidal and exploitative projects justified by the modern/colonial rhetoric of progress.
Given Forensic Architecture’s commitment to investigating cases of social violence, environmental injustice and human rights violations perpetrated by state and governmental agencies, Weizman recognised early on the potential of presenting such investigations—often visually and sonically rich as well as politically revelatory—across diverse arenas for scrutiny and dialogue. Beyond their presentation in international courts, grassroots and activist spaces, truth commissions and open-access online platforms, their work has also entered the museum, which Weizman views as an open forum distinct from legal frameworks that often privilege the interests of those in power. This recognition underscores how, since its founding in 2010, Forensic Architecture has advanced disobedient approaches to aesthetics by merging counter-implementation methodologies derived from forensic science with disciplines rooted in representation, including architecture, software development, filmmaking, investigative journalism, science and law.
The task of subverting the forensic gaze and its attendant practices has been greatly aided by an era in which digital access to information and data has become widely feasible, permeating all facets of Western knowledge production, including research-driven artmaking at the intersection of multiple fields. In this context, Weizman and Forensic Architecture have meaningfully metabolised the democratisation of mediation technologies ranging from everyday smartphone cameras to advanced tools such as satellite imagery, 3D scanning and cartographic or topographic mapping. Their work strengthens the relationship between research and art, enabling open-source investigations that interrogate systemic violence with both heightened precision and critical insight.
Tropicalising, not Decolonising
More than a decade after the emergence of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, in collaboration with media theorist Matthew Fuller, published Investigative Aesthetics: The Politics of Truth. I consider this book seminal for practitioners working with technology, media and critical processes of counter-investigation, as it extends Forensic Architecture’s methods to articulate the framework of investigative aesthetics. This is a compelling and provocative set of principles for engaging with aesthetic practices that challenge the monopolisation of truth by state agencies and corporations (Fuller and Weizman 2021).
Given the multidimensional complexity of the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX conundrum, the conceptual framework of investigative aesthetics has been a crucial source of guidance. This has been especially true in the long and meticulous development of a multifaceted methodology for conducting research that entails the continuous recollection of documents across multiple formats. These include: testimonies, sound recordings of rocket launches captured with specialized decibel meters, sonic spectral analyses, film documentation, 360° footage, news media reports and environmental assessments that legitimise SpaceX’s operations in the Mexico–U.S. borderlands. The transdisciplinary nature of investigating the cultural, environmental and geopolitical impact of Starship/Superheavy’s sonic shock waves has required that I cultivate the ability to weave fragments of information into coherent narratives through a dialogical exchange between the studio and the field, as emphasised by Weizman and Fuller (2021).
My engagement with the community of Playa Bagdad creates space for this synergy, which strongly resonates with what Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire (1970) described as praxis—the reciprocal act of thinking and doing (Freire 1970). Throughout this process, I have been guided by another crucial aspect of the investigative aesthetics framework that prioritises the voices of those experiencing systemic violence firsthand (Fuller and Weizman 2021). In order to listen and make use of aesthetics to represent external realities shaped by violence in Latin America, it is first necessary to grasp their historical origins. This includes: the cultural and political implications they entail and the epistemological tensions they carry. For this reason, my engagement with the people and territory of Playa Bagdad began with a shift away from traditional forms of fieldwork toward strategies rooted in interrelational perspectives. This approach enabled me to dissect the structures of power embedded in this contentious zone of the Mexico–US borderlands.
This transition was made possible through the hybridisation of the frameworks of investigative aesthetics and decoloniality. I refer to this process, which was essential to my investigation, as ‘tropicalisation’. Such hybridisation entailed recognising the taxonomy of each framework in order to identify their points of intersection. The process sought to balance the forensic emphasis on employing technologies of mediation to investigate the causes of life’s deprivation, with decoloniality’s epistemological commitment to preserving life. Together, these approaches advocate for new political imaginaries in which horizontal coexistence becomes possible: pluriversality.
When I speak of tropicalising, I refer to the appropriation of a Western framework of counter-representation, such as investigative aesthetics, which is then used to address the unique complexities and contours of marginalised realities. These realities are shaped by the imposition of modern, colonial, global designs built on practices of erasure in Latin America, such as Playa Bagdad—a territory that epitomises what the colonial gaze has historically identified as the ‘tropics’.
Although Playa Bagdad bears an unconventional name for a Latin American community, its origin lies in the area’s distinctive sand dunes, which evoke stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern desert landscapes. In reality, however, Playa Bagdad is surrounded by water: a lagoon, a river and the Gulf of Mexico. Together, these elements form a vibrant ecosystem that serves as a critical migratory corridor and nesting ground for numerous bird species—an environment increasingly threatened by SpaceX’s expanding presence in the region. So when I say that Playa Bagdad embodies a vision of the tropics, I am not referring to its temperate climate or rich biosphere. Rather, I invoke the term through the lens of early European cartographies of Latin America and the Caribbean, in which colonial empires affixed the labels tropical and subtropical onto colonised geographies as a means of legitimising subjugation (Ring 2003).
As outlined by Martinican writer-theorist Suzanne Césaire (1941) in ‘Léo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations’ (Césaire 1941), the colonial apparatus, by employing terms such as primitive and barbarian, constructed the tropics as a category that deemed certain geographical entities inferior to the West. Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, this designation has functioned as a mechanism of othering, mirroring much of Edward Said’s (1978) idea of Orientalism as a cultural and political construction of the West designed to subjugate (David 2000). In this way, the category of tropical signifies not only a physical location but also a conceptual space, much like the Mexico–U.S. borderlands. This dual interpretation is further underscored by Martinican poet and civil rights activist Aimé Césaire (1951) in Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire 1951). In this seminal essay on the emergence of decolonial thought across regions with shared colonial legacies, Césaire critiques French geographer Pierre Gourou’s Les Pays Tropicaux, who—out of imperialist disdain—asserted that great civilizations could only arise in temperate climates and claimed that any advanced cultures in so-called tropical regions were the result of external influences from the West (Césaire 1950, p. 55).
To make my point, it is necessary to bring into the conversation the emergence of the literary Martinican magazine Tropiques, co-founded in the early 1940s by Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire. This publication helped give rise to the movement of Caribbean Surrealism. Through Tropiques, Martinican writers, thinkers and civil rights activists engaged in the anti-colonial struggle of the French Caribbean colonies, exploring the revolutionary potential of expressive forms that embraced a critical approach to aesthetics, making poetry and art instruments of political resistance. This synergy was further underscored in 1945, when Tropiques published Aimé Césaire’s essay ‘Poetry and Knowledge’. The piece opens with the simple yet provocative assertion: ‘Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge’ (Césaire 1996, p. 134). It articulates a call to move beyond rationality toward alternative forms of language capable of addressing what dominant discourse excludes. In this sense, Césaire’s proposition resonates strongly with the consolidation of the framework of investigative aesthetics. Weizman and Fuller (2021) emphasise that one of the framework’s core capacities is the articulation of counter-narratives grounded in both aesthetic and scientific sensibilities. These narratives enable alternative forms of sensing and sense-making (Fuller and Weizman 2021).
Aimé Césaire’s and Suzanne Césaire’s powerful words and visionary editorial leadership were pivotal in establishing Tropiques as a platform for transcontinental dialogue with André Breton and, by extension, with Surrealism. In her article ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’, Suzanne Césaire (1996) declared that the most urgent task of Surrealism was ‘to liberate the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called reason’ (Césaire 1996, p. 126). Tropiques thus became an arena for cultivating a situated form of Surrealism—one that appropriated, adapted and transformed a Western intellectual movement to align with the Caribbean struggle for decolonisation. Through this process, I would argue, Tropiques effectively tropicalised Surrealism, reinterpreting its tenets to bridge worldviews that were geographically distant yet united in their commitment to mobilise aesthetics, poetry,and discourse as tools for confronting questions of underrepresentation.
In this same spirit of Tropiques, my praxis aims to tropicalise the forensic option in the arts rather than decolonise it. Using the latter would imply that the forensic option is inherently colonial. This would be a false claim, given that its foundational basis and practices—at least all of those I mentioned in the previous section—are driven by the critical metabolisation of anti-colonial struggles. Tropicalising, in this way, emerges from the cultivation of intersectional perspectives across worldviews that, while shaped by different subjectivities, share impulses to interrogate dominant discourse and strive for liberation. This move might entail grappling with the many paradoxes and contradictions that underlie the articulation of new and endemic narratives rooted in the colonial legacy of the Third World. At the same time, these narratives are set into dialogue with the disobedient voices shaping the critical epistemic spheres of the North Atlantic. Through this equation, I argue, it is possible to repurpose the tools of hegemonic representation through relational, aesthetic practices.
Tropicalisation at Playa Bagdad
Five years of investigating a case of transboundary sonic violence in Playa Bagdad—which I present here solely as a case study, since every instance of human rights violations and socio-environmental injustice carries its own irreducible complexity—have been guided by the effort to tropicalise what I call the forensic option. This has meant integrating the framework of investigative aesthetics into that of decoloniality, not as a simple fusion but as a careful process of hybridisation. This process recognises the epistemological foundations of each framework in order to identify where they complement and challenge one another. From this intersection, I have developed alternative strategies for addressing underrepresentation that are grounded in solidarity, collective listening and the critical use of mediation technologies. These are not technologies wielded in service of extractive truth claims, but rather as instruments for unsettling the ways in which hegemonic systems of truth production erase the political existence of Playa Bagdad. This approach has enabled me to construct a non-static, contingent praxis. This praxis continues to evolve within what Catherine Walsh (2023) describes as ‘decolonial cracks’, fissures in the totalising structures of coloniality that offer fertile ground for cultivating communal strategies for ‘re-existing in times of de-existing’ (Walsh 2023, p. 7).
At the heart of this praxis lies the ‘Public Art Program: For a Shared (Outer) Space’, a socially engaged, community-based initiative I began nearly three years ago with Ana Cerino, a local educator and community organiser. The project draws inspiration from Edward Makuka Nkoloso and his Zambian Space Program (Gasser 2023), which sought to create space—both metaphorically and literally—for the so-called Third World to participate in the mid-twentieth-century space race. In resonance, our initiative orbits around an inflatable planetarium as a critical gesture. While such domes are typically deployed to showcase the power of science and technology—especially in narratives of outer space exploration—we subvert this logic. In Playa Bagdad, the planetarium becomes a space for unlearning: an open forum where the anxieties, desires and lived realities of coexistence with SpaceX’s spaceport can be voiced, explored and collectively addressed (Reyes-Retana 2023). Rather than celebrating technological domination, it invites a collective re-imagining of futures. It makes room for voices long relegated to the margins, now threatened with further silencing by the roar of massive rockets and the deafening rhetoric of progress.
Earlier in 2025, the program’s positive impact was recognised by the Jumex Museum in Mexico City, whose support enabled it to grow into a more permanent project that we named ‘Taller de Investigación Espacial’ [Workshop for Spatial Investigation]. This name reflects not only the project’s focus on this new chapter of outer space industrialisation but, more importantly, on the fact that the community exists at the geographical and epistemological thresholds of Mexico, Latin America and by extension the Third World. Thanks to the generosity of Playa Bagdad residents—who donated land for its realisation—we built a schoolhouse where Ana Cerino and I lead educational activities. Here, we established the only free-access high-speed internet connection in the area, along with computers, cameras, recorders and other media tools. This is not merely a schoolhouse but a public hub for accessing and interacting with digital information.
Photodocumentation of Taller de Ideas Espaciales / Workshop for Spatial Investigation
El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, Tamaulipas, Mexico.