Aural Fragmentation is the fourth and final installment of season two of Storefront: Broadcasts. This special episode is produced and sound-designed by Mexican artist, researcher, and community organizer Jerónimo Reyes-Retana. He expands upon the ideas explored in our previous episode, Fugitive Terrain, such as  the tension of water bodies as contested sites of catastrophe, conflict, and violence, but also as frontiers of freedom and retreat. 

Aural Fragmentation compiles a selection of ideas, provocations, and speculations stemming from a unique encounter at the easternmost edge of the Mexico-US borderlands. In this hidden corner of Tamaulipas, an oyster field vital to the local economy of the marginalized community of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad is now in alarming proximity to the SpaceX launch port at Boca Chica, Texas. In this context, confluence extends beyond the meeting of the waters of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico, creating a threshold not only between Mexico and the US but also between the so-called Third World and the First, inviting reflection on the emergence of new frontiers in outer space.

For over three years, Reyes-Retana has examined this Mexico-US confrontation through the multifocal lens of decoloniality. By implementing contingent and relational research methodologies in collaboration with educator and community organizer Ana Cerino, Reyes-Retana’s work seeks to establish alternative channels of political agency in response to a unique case of social and environmental injustice caused by the sonic shock waves produced by SpaceX’s massive launchers during lift-offs and static fire tests—a situation that, paradoxically, remains silenced. In this episode, Mexican musician Cecilia Bastida—one of the leading voices of the emblematic music band Tijuana No—reads a text in which Reyes-Retana uses the oyster field of Playa Bagdad as a vertex to articulate a multitemporal and multidimensional dialogue with Chicana feminist writer and thinker Gloria Anzaldúa’s engagement with borders as sites for conjuring emancipatory synergies.

This episode includes testimonies from Reyna, a prominent community member who has worked in the oyster field for more than two decades and is a collaborator in Reyes-Retana’s research. Her voice is complemented by on-site field recordings that offer a sonic perspective of a landscape shaped by dissonant realities. Through an interplay of languages and juxtaposed symbols, stereophonic sound impressions invite reflection on how borderlands serve as fertile conceptual terrains for the emergence of third zones for listening—spaces from which to navigate a geopolitical climate of aural fragmentation.

Swamplands: Broadcasts | Aural Fragmentation

Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the changing urban landscape of the city over the years, and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life.