Earth Not a Globe: When Images Decide What We Believ
Frederick
Contemporary culture is less defined by what we know than by what images allow us to believe. In an era where information is infinite, certainty has become a style, performed, defended, aestheticized. Earth Not a Globe, the ongoing photographic project by Brussels based artist Philippe Braquenier, enters this terrain not as a debunker, but as a quiet anatomist of belief.
Braquenier turns his lens toward flat earth discourse, one of the most persistent and strangely poetic conspiracy narratives of our time. Not to ridicule it, nor to explain it away, but to inhabit its visual logic. By recreating the empirical proofs favored by nineteenth century proto conspiracists and their contemporary heirs, he exposes something more unsettling than misinformation: the seduction of images detached from context, floating freely, asking to be trusted.
What gives the work its resonance today is not its subject, but its method. Braquenier leaves the seams visible. Manipulations are not hidden. They are offered. The image admits its own construction. In doing so, the work mirrors our broader visual culture, where Instagram truths, cinematic realism, and algorithmic certainty blur into a single visual language. Authenticity becomes less about accuracy than coherence. If it looks convincing, it becomes convincing.
This is not a project about the flatness of the Earth. It is about the flattening of meaning. About how images circulate faster than thought, and how doubt itself has become a material. Braquenier’s photographs operate in that ambiguous zone where skepticism and fascination coexist, where the desire to preserve knowledge collides with the impossibility of fixing it.
Seen today, Earth Not a Globe feels less like a critique of conspiracy culture than a portrait of contemporary consciousness. Fragmented, reflexive, suspicious of authority yet hungry for narrative. In the age of post truth, the question is no longer what is real, but what we are willing to assemble into reality, and how convincingly it can be framed.
Earth Not a Globe is on view from 15 January to 22 March 2026 at Contretype, a photography art center in Saint-Gilles. The exhibition is part of the programme of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2026.
