On the ferry to Fogo Island, itself an island off Newfoundland, what I had expected was quite different to the scene unfolding in front of me. There were lots of islands, mostly heavily wooded, and I had no idea which one was Fogo Island, nor even the length of the ferry ride itself.
I was headed there in August 2016 to spend some time at the Museum of the Flat Earth, an institution dedicated to the exploration of unconventional thinking (here’s a local report about it). The Museum is itself an artwork, an elaborate appropriation of esoteric thinking all created by Kay Burns, who also plays the role of curator Dr Iris Taylor.
It reminds visitors of the importance of questioning the information which we encounter on a daily basis as authoritative knowledge, with its displays focused around the history of flat earth thinking, key figures in the movement and local archaeological excavations.
Since then I have provided a voiceover for a video documenting Kay’s experiment to measure the Earth’s flatness on a frozen lake in Labrador (which I hope to show in London in the spring). I have also begun investigating the life and disappearance of Bartholomew Seeker (who was a key figure in the Canadian Flat Earth Society) through time spent in Ireland in 2017.
The culmination of this so far is yet another piece of island-based research, Navigating the Edge, (published by my own Imaginative Press) which begins with the sighting of an island floating above the clouds…
