The Baterías Project, The Silent Movie, 2010.

Laurent Grasso's film depicts the ancient defence system of Cartagena as an archaic but effective device of surveillance, an iconic symbol of the relationship between northern Africa and Spain. Cartagena is a strategic harbour in the Mediterranean, and as such, it has been defended by fortresses and bastions, protected against the dangers of piracy and those foreign fleets which regularly raided the city. Using a vocal narration to simultaneously describe history and legend, Grasso¿s film explores notions of fear and paranoia, while creating a parallel between events from the past and the present day.

1972, Mulhouse, France. Lives and works in Paris. Laurent Grasso works and reworks with the more or less identifiable forms of our control-oriented society, while subverting the cinematic techniques and conventions that shape our collective imagination. He creates environments with a strong narrative potential, combining atavistic fears, scientific evidence and ominous, contemporary mythologies. In some ways, his works can be seen as reviving a taste for the paranoid retro-futuristic prophecies pronounced by Charles Fourier two centuries ago. Light, sound, radio and electromagnetic waves, natural, paranormal and meteorological phenomena are regularly incorporated in his works to create totally new sensory experiences. These become vehicles or partly finished products of the imagination, to be completed by the viewer. By generating a tension between the works on show, their environment and the dramatic projections to which they sometimes give rise; Laurent Grasso creates nagging mental images that tend to obscure our view of what we commonly call "reality".