Shifting Baselines

Where the Rio Grande meets the sea, the rockets of SpaceX are launched; astronomers gaze skyward, hawkers shill their wares and environmentalists survey the damage. Welcome to Boca Chica, USA.

Who is the explorer? Who is the survivor? Who is left behind? And where? SHIFTING BASELINES looks closely at Starbase, the rocket production and launch facility of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. We witness how the vision of space travel changes the urban and natural landscape around the base in Texas. Yet not only the immediate surroundings; this results in more and more orbiting satellites all around the world.

With dramatic black-and-white cinematography, the film follows residents criticising the base’s impact on their neighbourhoods and the surrounding nature, scientists warning of space debris and light pollution, and enthusiasts cheering the rockets on, fully behind the dream of space exploration.

SHIFTING BASELINES is not only concerned with rockets and space exploration, but also with the ideas and narratives that surround them. It considers how our understanding of progress and our visions of the future can influence the way we respond to environmental change in the present. The ambition to colonize space can offer an appealing sense of escape: the promise of a new world elsewhere may make the environmental destruction of our own planet feel less immediate or urgent.

These screenings are part of ARCHITECTURE ON FILM, the monthly film series presented by De Cinema and the Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi).