POST-WAR PICTURES OF A WAR THAT DID NOT TAKE PLACE

Carine Krecké, Elisabeth Krecké

Carine and Elisabeth Krecké visited abandoned military installations located on the northern coast of Galicia (Spain). The batteries, bunkers, and anti-aircraft bases were operational during a large part of the 20th century, including the Franco era. After demilitarization in the late 1980s, when Spain joined the European community, these vestiges of utopian warfare and surveillance were rapidly forgotten, denied, plundered, and covered by graffiti and dense brushwood.
While exploring these batteries and their filthy undergrounds, the question arose as to what the everyday life of soldiers must have been like, waiting for an undefined enemy, for decades, in boundless boredom and routine – an enemy that never showed up. Similar to a universe created by Beckett where the protagonists patiently wait for Godot, simulate or fantasise war, repeat the same manœuvres over and over again while nothing ever happens.
Ironically, the photographic documents look like ‘war pictures’, which poses the question recurrent in war photography: what is in fact the face of war?