THE SKEPTICS - PhMuseum

The Skeptics - Relics of technological goddess is an ongoing project combining film, photography and objects. It is based on an amateur practice derived from ufology, scientific ufology, a fringe community of thinkers comprising around a hundred amateurs in Spain. The beauty of their approach to reality and perception, described in their writings, lies in a utopian desire to render the modern UFO myth factitious. An aesthetic of disappearance and image blindness in which Photography and its physicality become a speculative object, serving here to deconstruct a grand contemporary narrative.

The Skeptics exhibition project is built on the interaction between four axes of research. - The first axis is video installation and Polytych photography. The video triptych, featuring images filmed in 16mm on the heights of Mount Teide on the Spanish island of Tenerife. This film project is a study of the site's specific landscapes and history. In 1974, the implosion of an American ballistic missile created a 30km-diameter halo of light between the Canary Islands and the southern Sahara. The UFO myth was born on the island of Tenerife. Several successive waves consolidated the myth, culminating in the huge gathering organized by Francisco Padron in 1989, which brought together 10,000 people at the "Las Canadas" site for an Alien-Contact. The "Las Canadas" site, defined in the amateur jargon of scientific ufology as a "Magical Place", is the site of the "Alien-Contact".

- The second axis is that of the archive/document and plays on the ambiguity of image registers. It focuses on a perceptual phenomenon: Flash Blindness, which is used in scientific ufology to define the facticity of many sightings. By re-enacting these "visual deficiencies" myself in the laboratory, using explosions on 4x5inch silver film plates that directly burn the negative, this series generates a reflection on the materiality of the image through a false collection of apparitions.

- The third axis explores scientific laboratory tools such as UFO detectors, which attempt to capture the invisible. These objects are in themselves traces, like proof, not of the existence or non-existence of UFOs, but of the peculiarity, even strangeness, of scientific ufology.

Through its documentary, sociological and reflexive approach to images, The Skeptics exhibition project is conceived as an immersive space in which to meditate on the obsolescence of a belief. By giving a voice to this community of skeptical ufologists, the project seeks to reveal the forgotten contemporary rituals that have sculpted the imagination of the geological chaos of the Canary Islands. These otherworldly landscapes, obsolete thoughts and outdated scientific tools are all relics of a ruined imaginary that questions the post-truth mood of our times. Jean Rouch once said that "the role of anthropology is to put disturbing objects into circulation". By focusing on these successive waves of apparitions from the 80s and 90s, the project offers us a reflection on the loss of utopias and the question of progress, and questions the mythology that scientific ufologists are trying to deconstruct, the governance of our reality by the goddesses of technology.