back in the day. schooldays. lord how we laughed at the primitive disbelievers who doubted the certainties of science, suggesting columbus was mad to sail across the atlantic. that columbus couldn’t find a westward passage to the indies (he didn’t) and who warned of his falling off the edges of the earth (he didn’t do that either)
but what if they were right? maybe the earth is flat. take a bus ride through the fens of norfolk and it certainly looks flat. at the rokeby gallery a group of artists have mounted an exhibition based upon just this premiss.
for many years the flat earth society has maintained a tradition of scepticism in the face of absolute certainties, no less repellent from discourses of science than they are from religion. or as the exhibition catalogue has it:
The Earth Not a Globe takes as its starting point the phenomena of flat earth theorem whose belief system of ‘flatness’ diverges from the earth as a globe. Thinking about scales of perception, their limitations and how we deal with this on a tangible level the exhibition brings together a selection of artists who employ cartographic systems of resisting one point of view for another potential combination.
As the title of the show suggests the slippage between what we experience as an earth and what we experience as a globe is subject to scaling; an expansive or reductive series of idioms, events or knowledges. Knowledge is not a given.