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Nominated in

2021

Michiel De Cleene was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1988. The artist currently lives and works in Ghent.

M.D.C. always starts a conversation about Reference Guide with the last photo in the book, and this time is no exception. He took the photograph in question in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

He enjoys telling the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine, a collection of 18th-century fake fossils — known in English as Beringer’s Lying Stones — of which some can be found at the abovementioned museum. In 2017, H.V., who was in charge of managing the science collection, gave M.D.C. and L.K. a guided tour of the museum and told them of all kinds of curiosities to be found there, including the famous Lügensteine. In the early 18th century, two palaeontologists were keen to play a trick on an arrogant colleague, a certain Johann Beringer. They buried a large part of around 2,000 fake fossils — featuring suns, stars, snails, shells and even Hebrew inscriptions — and sent a beautiful young woman, who pretended to be a doctorate student, to visit Beringer with the rest of the stones. He fell into the trap and went in search of the fossils. He found them, believed the hand of God to be the only explanation for these — what were referred to back then as — ”figure stones”, and wrote a scientific article about them.

Things ended badly for everyone. Beringer realised too late that he had been tricked. He took his colleagues to court and won the case; however, his own name will always be associated with the Lügensteine. M.D.C. grins as he tells the story but is no longer sure whether the young lady’s role in it is true.

We read about the entries in Reference Guide at the back of the publication: “The collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the sidelines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress”. A few days later, L.K. calls H.V. just to check the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine. It was most likely two small boys who first brought the stones to Johann Beringer.

- Text by Lars Kwakkenbos (.TIFF)

Michiel De Cleene was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1988. The artist currently lives and works in Ghent.

Ana Zibelnik (b. 1995, Ljubljana) is a photographer currently based in the Netherlands. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2018 and is currently completing her MA degree in film and photographic theory at Leiden University.

Camillo Pasquarelli is interested in long-term projects adopting photography as a tool of knowledge contaminated by the self-reflective approach of anthropology.

Alessia Rollo is born in South Italy in 1982. She received her BA at University in Perugia and she is crossing her MA in Publishing at University Statale in Milan.

Alexander Kadow lives and works in Hamburg, Germany, where he was born in 1985. The examination of the possibilities and limits of photography plays a decisive role in his work.

Anna Orłowska received an MFA from the Photography Department at the National Film School in Łódz, Poland (2011) and an undergraduate degree from the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava,Czech Republic (2013).

Francesca Catastini (Lucca, 1982) is an author based in Tuscany. She holds an MA in Photography and Visual Design from NABA Academy in Milan.

Bulgarian artist and director George Stamenov examines the immersive possibilities of story telling by challenging the dogmas of contemporary film making. His short films carry a unique aesthetic that is derived from Eastern Europe.