David De Beyter
The Skeptics

Exhibition Details

In 1974, the implosion of an American missile created a halo of light between the Canary Islands and the southern Sahara. The episode was followed by a wave of UFO sightings, culminating in a gathering that brought together more than 10,000 people in Las Cañadas, Tenerife, in 1989.

The Skeptics draws a line between these events and ufology, a discipline that attempts to analyze UFO sightings after scientific criteria, with the aim of finding out their true causes. De Beyter’s images fall somewhere between ufology’s rigorous methodology, and the magical thinking of blindly believing in a phenomenon – or in the challenge of demolishing it. As a whole, they are an attempt to look closely at something that is very far. Archival images of the events in Tenerife meet pseudo-scientific documents. New photographs and videos taken in the Canary Islands mingle with cameraless, darkroom images, where the author imprints explosions on the negative, looking somewhat similar to sightings. Can we really trust images? How truthful are they?

Filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch wrote that “the role of anthropology is to put disturbing objects into circulation.” This collection of obsolete materials and false findings is not meant to prove the existence of UFOs, or their non-existence. It is a trace of the culture around them, of its poetry and absurdity. It is a reflection on how their history is, after all, a history of photographs: surfaces on which to project a hypothesis and its opposite, anchors made possible only by their ambiguity.