Fact-checkers agree that Switzerland is indeed a fake country

The film opens with a deepfake of Donald Trump admitting he once considered buying Switzerland, a claim that, given the current climate, doesn’t sound entirely implausible.

But then comes the twist: he reveals that Switzerland never actually existed, another claim that feels oddly in character for the president of the United States.

Karpi then takes us on a surreal journey through a bizarre conspiracy theory, reminiscent of that one school friend who always shares the most outrageous ideas. He suggests that Switzerland is a fabricated nation, backing it up with deliberately shoddy, AI-generated slop, the kind of content currently flooding social media.

From artificially rendered mountain landscapes to "un-holey" Swiss cheese (and even a cameo from the Loch Ness Monster), the video gradually builds its case, concluding with the theory that the King of Sweden invented Switzerland to control the global financial system.

At first glance, the video feels like a tourism campaign and seems destined to end with the line: “Experience the real Switzerland. Visit Switzerland.” But instead, looking at the post reveals that the Fotomuseum is the collab partner behind the project.

The campaign cleverly uses satirical humour and our current obsession with conspiracy culture to comment on the dangers of our digital age.

In an era where deepfakes and AI-generated content are becoming ever more sophisticated, with Google launching an AI video generator (VEO 3) just last week, capable of syncing AI visuals with speech, the film highlights how vital it is to question what we see and not to fall for the lure of the image.

The video has gone viral with over six million views and has sparked a large amount of engagement online.

For me it brings to mind Peter McIndoe’s satirical “Birds Aren’t Real” movement, which claimed birds were government surveillance drones, and perhaps even more so the Bielefeld conspiracy, a long-running joke since the 90s that the German city doesn’t actually exist, which led the city to offer €1 million in 2025 to anyone who could prove its non-existence.

And in fact, the idea of Switzerland not existing has been around for some time, with a Reddit community, r/SwitzerlandIsFake, being around since 2019, dedicated to proving that Switzerland does not exist, but the conspiracy itself isn’t the point of the video.

Fake news, disinformation and realistic image manipulation are nothing new, but the ease with which they can now be created and believed is escalating rapidly. 

Public figures have shared AI-generated content, such as Trump sharing fake AI images of Swiftie fans wearing “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts and another of himself on a 'Canadian' mountain that's not even in Canada.

That’s what makes this campaign so perfect for the reopening of a museum dedicated to examining how photography and digital media influence our social, political, economic and cultural realities.