CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Luis Hernan Borderland Utopias: Creative Engagements at the End of the World
Borderland Utopias explores the paradigmatic relationship between notions of utopia and the apocalypse as mobilised by the architectures and infrastructures at Boca Chica. The small town north of the border with Mexico has become the launch site for a planned colonisation of Mars led by Elon Musk.
Core to the development of the site is the eschatologies of Silicon Valley: utopian narratives which promise to technologically augment, foster and optimise life while requiring the violent destruction of the status quo and a blind, faith-based adherence to the vision of a charismatic prophet. At a time of multiple crises when the eschatologies of Silicon Valley are hailed as the answer to avoid the end of times, Borderland Utopias aims to contextualise them in their geographical location. The project suggests that understanding the geography of the Mexico/United States borderlands is crucial in making visible the historical processes of settler colonialism that inform the contemporary biopolitics of Silicon Valley, which, in their imaginings of rescuing humanity from a dying planet, do so by excluding and erasing gendered and racialised bodies. The project creates a “feral atlas” (assembled by mapping, drawing, photography, storying) which makes visible the indigenous experiences and imaginations of end-of-worlds and utopia that have taken place in Boca Chica. By bringing forth these complex subjectivities, often marginalised, hidden and written off by the official narratives, Borderland Utopias aims to offer them as alternative templates for an understanding of the end of the world that creates equitable futures.