Hybrid / Transmedia Novel · 2025
WRITING · FILM · SOUND · DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVE
University of Texas at El Paso
As a Terrestrial explores the figure of the “alien” at the intersection of migration, extraterrestrial imagination, and the institutional language of the U.S.–Mexico border.
As a Terrestrial is a hybrid, transmedia novel that brings together narrative prose, poetry, documentary archives, screenplay, and sonic transcription to explore the border through different forms of writing, listening, and image.
The project follows Magdalena, a writer who arrives in the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso region with her son and begins investigating the language used to classify bodies, territories, and experiences as “alien.” As different stories emerge—migration, disappearance, institutional violence, radio transmissions, and encounters with the unknown—the word alien becomes a point of contact between the migrant, the extraterrestrial, and the person estranged by the machinery of the border.
A Transmedia and Bilingual Novel
The project treats formal hybridity not as an ornament, but as a method of inquiry. Writing, sound, moving image, documents, and archival materials approach the same territory from different perspectives, allowing contradictions between perception, body, language, and landscape to remain visible.
Rather than describing the desert as an empty space, As a Terrestrial approaches it as a territory continually produced through language, institutions, memory, and acts of exclusion.
Noreste Chapter — Audiovisual Script (Excerpt):
Credits
Author & Project Creator
Facundo Santiago Torrieri
MFA Thesis · Bilingual Creative Writing
University of Texas at El Paso
Thesis Advisor
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny
2025
The work was submitted as Torrieri’s MFA thesis in UTEP’s Creative Writing Department and is archived through ScholarWorks@UTEP.