David de Beyter

David de Beyter defines himself as a photographer-artist. A graduate of the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre in Brussels, he conducts both documentary and conceptual research through his film photographs and video installations. Captivated by territories, both for their physiognomy and human exploitation, de Beyter explores the history of place. He conducts his research through archives and personal observations, scrutinizing every detail until he has exhaustively explored the landscape.

In his series The Skeptics, de Beyter delves into the fascinating history of the Canary Islands. Since the late ’70s, these islands became a stage for extraterrestrial contact experiments, drawing nearly 10,000 believers and skeptics to Tenerife’s heights. In these desert landscapes, called “Magical Places,” ancient troglodyte caves—once indigenous habitats—have transformed into refuges for answer-seeking sects.

Are we facing an arid desert in North America, a Spanish volcanic landscape, or perhaps a lunar one? De Beyter plays with this spatio-temporal ambiguity, disorienting our senses. The amplification of yellow tones creates this confusion, evoking the aesthetics of old Ektachrome film. Meanwhile, the series’ darker landscapes, achieved through UV ray occlusion, plunge us into an artificial nocturnal atmosphere.

Passionate about science fiction, mystery, and space, de Beyter disrupts our bearings through his disconcerting treatment of film images. By incising the negative with a fine blade, the photographer erases a fragment of reality to superimpose an artifact in his landscapes’ skies. This alteration echoes ufologist theories, a new age movement of the ’70s and ’80s that ardently refutes UFO sightings, dismissing them as optical phenomena or image errors.