CDM Supported Project 'Void in Resonance' Awarded 2025 CIFO x Ars Electronica Award

Jerónimo Reyes-Retana´s sponsored project Void in Resonance has been awarded the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation x Ars Electronica Award recognizing emerging artists who demonstrate pioneering work in digital art with innovative approaches and shed light on how local challenges and universal issues correspond. 

Reyes-Retana defines colonial voids as territorialities and communities subjected to practices of cartographic erasure that facilitate the expansion of modern/colonial global designs through infrastructure development and industrialization projects. Such is the case of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, a marginalized and underserved community located at the easternmost edge of the Mexico-US border, where the waters of the Río Bravo meet the Gulf of Mexico.

At this confluence lies an oyster field vital to Playa Bagdad’s local economy. However, with the construction of SpaceX’s spaceport just two miles north, on U.S. soil, the human bodies, biosphere, and vernacular architecture surrounding Playa Bagdad’s oyster field are now threatened by the sonic shock waves produced during lift-offs and static fire tests of SpaceX’s massive launchers. Paradoxically, this unique, corporate-driven phenomenon of transboundary sonic violence remains silenced and overlooked by the state agencies responsible for environmental regulation in the region.

Informed by over three years of field and community work, Void in Resonance—a film installation—captures intimate moments of a SpaceX launch through the eyes of those working in the oyster field, revealing the personal and collective impacts of the land-based infrastructure required for what has been mistakenly called a new era of outer space exploration when, in reality, it marks a new era of outer space industrialization.