What Laurent Grasso attempts to capture in his videos, installations and photographs is an infra-visible world which nonetheless remains disconnected from any documentary aspect. Everything is played out on the surface of things, within a paradoxical time linking a far away and an elsewhere to he figure of a pure present. Through his environmental mechanisms recalling scientific representations of reality, Grasso produces science-fiction stories with no identified subject. The evocation of electromagnetic or meteorological phenomena, like those of quantum physics or string theory, notably in Project 4-brane (2007), permit moments of absence, emptiness and enigma.

This is also the aim of Polair, which belongs to Grasso's attempt to create an archaeology of the future on the basis of different scientific domains. These domains do not constitute a direct source of illustrations but rather, generate an open-ended territory of hypotheses for fiction while questioning the status of representation. Polair reconstitutes the propagation of a pollen cloud similar to the propagation of the frightening blanket of fog he shows in Projection. Filmed in Berlin near the Fernsehturm (telecommunications tower) with a low-angle shot, Polair maps all the city's sources of electricity which seem to give substance to the pollen cloud. The projection in a closed space increases the political fiction aspect of the work, like another piece, Haarp (for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, 2007), which shows an antenna field on an Alaskan military base with the electric arcs formed between the antennas.

As with the Project 4-brane, Polair  generates a whole group of homological relationships of a technological nature between the immaterial networks for the transport of electricity on world scale and the magnetic interactions produced at the corpuscular scale of an urban pollen field. Like a filmic fable, a fiction emerges in this inframince space, at the intersection of narratives about control and the excessive powers of the technologies.

Pascale Cassagnau

Translated by  Miriam Rosen