Jonas Bendiksen's exploration of the North Macedonian town of Veles mixes fake news and documentary photography with ancient Slavic mythology. Through this project, Bendiksen seeks to pose critical questions around photography, trust and the representation of reality. The town is a provincial place of 40,000 inhabitants which has lost much of its economic base in recent decades. During the 2016 US presidential election, the town became a hub for 'fake news' production, where tech-savvy local youth created hundreds of clickbait websites posing as American political news portals. The photographs of the contemporary town are intertwined with excerpts and facsimiles from a 1919 archaeological discovery also called 'the Book' — a cryptic collection of 40 'ancient' wooden boards discovered in Russia, written in a proto-Slavic language. It was claimed to be a history of the Slavic people and their pre-Christian god of mischief, chaos and deception. While popular among Slavic nationalists, the text is debunked as a forgery by most scientists. Every character in the book is a digital 3D model avatar inserted into otherwise empty pictures; every image is a manipulation.