Behind the horizon

2012

Diaprint.
20 m x 3cm

“I am sitting on the beach and I keep a yardstick in front of me, parallel with the horizon. They say that the Earth is round and I want to verify if this is true. But my yardstick appears to be too short or the earth not round enough.”

Starting from a childhood memory, Behind The Horizon wants to visualize Earth’s curvature. It is an attempt to look behind the horizon. Not with a yardstick, but with a huge tube with a length of 10.832 km. This tube was carried by 310 volunteers at the Belgian Coast on the 14th of May 2010. The middle of this tube is resting on the ground. Five km to the left and 5 km to the right of this center point, the tube is already 229 cm away from the earth’s surface. A straight tube hanging above a convex Earth. A clearly visible and comprehensible image of the bending of the Earth.

The result of this experiment is a photograph of 20 meters long and 3 cm high: a collage of 1805 photographs (scale 1/505) which shows a tube with a length of 10,832 km carried by 310 people at the tide line of the Belgian coast.