“I joined forums and started following instagram pages and Flat Earth pages to see everything they were doing. I did more than a year of research before taking my first photo. I wanted to create a distance and thoroughly pretend I was on the wrong side of science. Sometimes I even doubted myself. Then Flat Earthers talk about very complicated, well-researched theories about fluid mechanics or thermodynamics. When I tried to understand where they wanted to go with their story, I wondered if they were just spouting nonsense or not. But they always leave out something small but essential, which makes their representation of things work in their favour.”

Philippe Braqueniers project ‚Earth not a globe’ first started in 2016 and focuses on the passionate community of Flat-Earthers, a movement that followed the work of British author Samuel Rowbotham, who sowed doubts and pseudo-scientific ideas about the shape of the earth at the end of the 19th century. The Flat-Earthers refuse the „round Earth conspiracy”, believe that GPS devices are rigged and only refer to empirical ‘evidence’, using elaborate theories. They feel that they’ve become prophets, in possession of information that the rest of the world is just too blind to see. In 2017, Mike Hughes launched himself in the air using a homemade rocket, trying to disprove NASA. He survived, but failed to see anything remarkable, thus ‚proving’ his point. In this series, Braquenier focuses on the cultural and political power of images in our society, particularly in a ‘post-truth-society’ in which facts have become subjective, the truth suspect and reality a construct. Braquenier is intrigued by the ways in which ideas are collected, shared, used and stored.