When Elephants Started to Fly

https://www.nataliaferber.com/earthly-manners-of-conspicuous-true

It was 2016, and I was living in London.

And then Brexit happened.

Or, more precisely, the Brexit campaign happened.

I watched it unfold from the front row, live and unfiltered, as a rather astonished spectator of something I knew existed but had never seen deployed quite like this before: the political manipulation of emotions.

I grown up in Spain and later move to Uruguay. I had seen political campaigns. I had also lived for seven years in the United States, the land of marketing, where you learn fairly quickly that truth can be dressed up, packaged, and sold.

But this was something else.

Suddenly, claims, half-truths, impossible figures, and promises were circulating as if they were facts. It didn’t seem to matter very much whether something was actually true.

What mattered was that it looked true.

That it provoked fear, hope, outrage, nostalgia.

That it worked.

I remember that infamous red bus travelling around the country with its promise of all those millions that would supposedly go back to the NHS if the United Kingdom l eft the European Union.

And I remember looking at it and thinking:

Can you really just say anything?

Apparently, yes.

What fascinated — and terrified — me was the realisation that truth was no longer at the centre of the discussion.

What mattered was constructing an image convincing enough to be believed.

And that was when I saw the parallel with Photoshop.

If It Looks True, Is It True?

As an artist, I work with images.

I know perfectly well how easy it is to take something that exists and transform it.

A photograph can document reality, but it can also become the starting point for inventing another one.

And that is exactly what I did.

The photographs in this series are mine. I was there. Those places exist. The images begin with something real.

But then I intervene.

I move things.

I add things.

I remove things.

I take things out of context.

I construct another reality.

A reality that is perfectly visible and absolutely impossible.

That is how Earthly Manners of Conspicuous Trues and Lies. A Study Reveals Elephants Can Fly was born.

Because if I can make an elephant fly in an image, someone else can make a lie fly too.

And if that lie is constructed, repeated, and distributed well enough, perhaps we eventually stop debating whether elephants can fly and start arguing about why they fly, who is to blame, and which political party will make them fly better.

That was the absurdity that interested me.

And it still does.

2016 Now Seems Almost Innocent

There is something I find particularly curious when I return to this work ten years later.

In 2016, we were still rather naive.

Social media was already everywhere, of course, but we didn’t yet fully understand the machinery we were building around ourselves.

Algorithms.

Targeting.

Our personal data.

Our emotions transformed into usable information.

Cookies could still sound more like something you had with a cup of tea than a mechanism capable of following you around the internet.

And while we were learning how to live inside this new world, others were already learning how to use it.

The Brexit campaign made me see something with extraordinary clarity that would later become part of everyday life:

you don’t need to convince people with facts if you can activate their emotions directly.

Fear.

Anger.

Pride.

Nostalgia.

Belonging.

The message doesn’t need to be entirely true.

It only needs to be believable enough.

From My Computer to the World

So I did what I know how to do.

I worked.

I took my photographs and began constructing my own lies.

Obvious lies.

Absurd lies.

Sometimes funny lies.

Elephants appearing where elephants have no business being.

Landscapes colliding with one another.

Scales that make no sense.

Impossible situations presented with all the visual authority of a photograph.

There was one small difference, of course.

I wanted you to know I was lying to you.

The manipulation was part of the work.

I wasn’t trying to hide it.

On the contrary, I wanted to expose the mechanism itself: that little moment when we look at something and our brain decides to believe it simply because it has the appearance of reality.

And then something rather wonderful happened.

The work began to travel.

The pieces that had grown out of that experience in London ended up being exhibited in places I could never have imagined at the time: Boston, Oklahoma City, Barcelona, Seville, Essen, London, Tokyo...

My elephants actually flew.

Not quite in the way the supposed “study” had announced, naturally.

They flew in crates, on aeroplanes, into exhibitions, and onto walls in different cities.

And they were very well received.

Truths, Lies and Elephants

Today, when I look back at this work, I no longer see it simply as a piece about Brexit.

I see it as a record of a moment.

A moment when something was changing right in front of us, and we didn’t yet quite know what to call it.

Lies have always existed.

So has propaganda.

Political manipulation was not invented by Facebook, nor was it invented in 2016.

But something changed in the speed, the scale, and the ability to deliver different messages to different people.

And, perhaps most importantly, something changed in our relationship with reality.

Maybe that is why I am still so fond of these elephants.

Because underneath the humour and the absurdity was a rather serious question:

What are we willing to believe when someone shows us exactly what we want to believe?

Ten years have passed.

We are still staring at screens.

We are still constructing realities.

We are still getting outraged.

We are still sharing.

And apparently, the elephants are still flying.

And Then There Is Spain

And now I live in Spain.

Ten years later, I find myself watching another political circus.

Different country. Different actors. Different slogans.

Same theatre.

What strikes me most is not even the ideological battle. It is the extraordinary spectacle of a group of adults — adults in age, at least — behaving like teenagers in a schoolyard.

He did it.

No, she did it.

They are worse.

They started it.

Look what they did.

Accusations fly from one side to the other with such speed that there is barely time to remember what anyone was actually talking about in the first place.

And perhaps the most fascinating part is watching politicians loudly condemn their opponents for things they themselves are doing.

Lying while accusing others of lying.

Manipulating while denouncing manipulation.

Spreading half-truths while demanding accountability for somebody else’s half-truths.

Moral outrage has become wonderfully flexible: unacceptable when they do it, perfectly justifiable when we do it.

Sometimes I watch Spanish politics and think that we have moved beyond Photoshop.

At least with Photoshop, you have to put some effort into constructing the alternative reality.

Politics has become a strange hall of mirrors in which everyone points at everyone else and shouts, “Fake!”, while carefully polishing their own reflection.

And we, the public, are expected to choose which version of reality we prefer.

That is perhaps what connects Spain today with the work I made in London in 2016.

Back then, I was interested in how easily an image could manipulate our perception of reality.

Today the question feels bigger.

What happens when manipulation becomes so constant that we stop expecting the truth at all?

When contradiction no longer embarrasses anyone?

When being caught in a lie is answered not with an explanation, but with another accusation?

When politics becomes less about governing and more about winning the daily argument?

In 2016, I Photoshopped elephants into places where they did not belong.

It was absurd.

That was the point.

Ten years later, I sometimes look at the political spectacle around me and think:

my flying elephants were considerably more believable.