Laurent Grasso

A film about the history of the bateria on the Spanish coast.

THE BATERIA

The bateria has been used for different purposes: to protect the coast against pirates to protect the Arsenal of CartagenaIt had a strong function during the independency of Cartagena in 1873, and has been in activity during Franco’s regime and even after his death until the 1990s. Laurent Grasso is interested in the batteria as an iconic object of the relation between North Africa and Cartagena since the 18th century. The bateria is in a way an archaic device for spying. Constructed in the 18th century, the batteria participates in a history of surveillance, together with other programs as Echelon. Even in their aesthetics, there is a similarity between Echelon and the batteria. ECHELON was reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s. Since the end of the Cold War it is believed to search also for hints of terrorist plots, drug dealers’ plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. The history of Echelon shows that it was a failure. Terrorist started to use archaic techniques like carrier pigeons for their communications. Laurent Grasso is interested in different devices of surveillance and the contrast between high tech programs as Echelon and Haarp and low tech tools as carrier pigeons. He has already used different military programs in previous works as fictional objects reinterpreted to create films and installations.