Batería de Cenizas. Methaphors of Defence

Lisa Le Feuvre

Mediterranean has become a part of everyday life, informed by a belief in a different, perhaps better, place on the opposite side of the sea. This gaze is echoed in Rosell Meseguer´s images that look through the slits of defence buildings along the harbour and coast of Cartagena on the Spanish Peninsula that were last used in combat during the Spanish Civil War but now are abandoned and isolated from transport links providing a panoramic gaze.

Exhibition Curator

The Photographers´Gallery, London GREAT 55, Summer 2004

The ruins of the memory and the fortification of the subject (some ideas related to Rosell Meseguer)

Fernando Castro Flórez

Traducción: Claudia de la Peña McTigue & Rosell Meseguer

“Cain’s house in the Enoch’ steppes is the beginning of the “blockhouse”, built according to protection scales and the needs of the new life, imaginary ruins that hardly sketch some design. Its ground plan is an alegory of the tomb, where sometimes stretches out as a labyrinth and a shelter for life. If chance decides it that way .

Zizek has pointed out that between the antagonisms that represent our time, the antagonism between abstraction which is more and more determinant in our lives, and the storm of pseudoconcrete images could have a key place. If we can understand the abstraction as a progressive self-discovery of the basis of art language, in a process of a particular de-pictorialization, we would also have to understand that in this process we find the core of the modern times. In a chaothic world one of the “exits” can be to get into the crypt or to camouflage oneself, avoid being naked in the open.

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Battery of Cenizas - Defence Methology II 1999-2005

Rosell Meseguer

After the Second World War, during Roosevelt’ s Presidency, the director of the Research and Science Development Office, Vannevar Bush, issued a report titled: Science, the Frontier without End. In this report, Mr. Bush talked about how defence strategies were put into practice in daily life. Vannevar, justified the need of military research to improve social welfare. One of the most outstanding improvements was the invention of the radar and its later use in everyday life.

This new eye, the radar, was able to detect submarines, which were first invented by Isaac Peral (Cartagena – Spain). Submarines constituted yet another element of military science that could be deactivated and detected by the radar.

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