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Peripheral Futures Borderland Utopias: Creative Engagements at the End of the World

  • Date in the past
  • Wednesday, 6 May 2026, 18:00 - 20:00
  • Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Seminargebäude, CATS Auditorium (R. 010.01.05), Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg
    • Dr. Louis Hernan, Heidelberg University, Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies

Borderland Utopias explores the paradigmatic relationship between notions of utopia and the apocalypse as mobilized 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 colonization of Mars led by Elon Musk.

  • Address

    Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies
    Seminargebäude
    CATS Auditorium (R. 010.01.05)
    Voßstraße 2
    69115 Heidelberg

  • Organizer

  • Event Type

    Series of events

    Talk

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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 contextualize 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 racialized 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.

All Dates of the Event 'Peripheral Futures – Reading History from the “Margins”'

Where is future created? Based on some of the research done in the Thematic Research Network “Denk(t)räume–(Re)thinking and Building Futures” and at CAPAS, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, this event series takes the question of building futures from the margins as its starting point for a review of some of the seminal literature in global history. The aim is to foreground marginalized sources (material peripheries, e.g., the “un-disciplined" knowledge produced by the arts), positions (socio-political pheripheries, e.g., that of indigenous protesters), and regions of the world (spatial peripheries, e.g., parts of the world that do not make headline news) as well as specific times (chronological pheripheries: questioning why there may be a privileging of specific periods in time while neglecting others). 

In taking what is read as “marginal”, its voices and sources seriously, and by including artistic and activist resources, this series offers an intervention to established academic reasoning: at a time when apocalyptic narratives and authoritarian visions of the future dominate public discourse, the events focus on different forms of “critical hope” that can emerge in times of crisis: analytically grounded, socially engaged, and convinced that a diverse, collectively shaped future arises from the productive tension between different worldviews, the event series sets out to test out transcultural perspectives on and alternative approaches to the writing of histories (of and for the future).

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