Two years of my life. Five trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Over a month in total. Weeks of trying to get authorisations, permits, approvals ‒ not always successfully. That’s when I send in friends who can do more than me, but when even they fail, I go in anyway. Like Stalker from the Strugatsky brothers’ book, or Major Degtyarev from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
I get into my off-road vehicle. I go everywhere in this. I’ve crossed the wilds of Africa, and I’ll even cross the radioactive zone. I make it to the most inaccessible and most dangerous places. Sometimes this results in forced decontamination, but it’s only a machine, it won’t get sick. I also decontaminate myself often ‒ all the residents of the zone give me home-made vodka to try.
To see the zone from the air, from a wider perspective, I board a well-worn Mi-2. Instead of individual tower blocks, cottages and equipment, I see whole abandoned villages, thousands of abandoned machines. I see the whole of Pripyat. A ghost town. It leaves a truly electrifying impression.
There’s some places you just cannot reach in a big helicopter. It is either too risky or prohibited by state regulations. For these locations, I use a remote-controlled drone. It allows me to get really close. I can see more. The impossible is rendered possible.
On the way I meet the re-settlers, the last inhabitants of the closed zone. I hear their stories about a carefree life, the beautiful Pripyat. About times gone by, their dreams, what they miss. It’s moving to listen to the stories of forced re-settlement, losing homes, property, loved ones. About illness and death. I’ve long since stopped believing that 30 fire-fighters and plant workers were the only fatalities of the nuclear catastrophe.
I visit closed sites, inaccessible to others. Rosocha: the biggest storage yard of radioactive vehicles. The nuclear power plant, where an unsuccessful experiment led to a catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. I go into the control room of block 4 ‒ the place where everything started from, where history changed its course. I also visit Chernobyl-2 and one of the most important elements of the system for early warning against nuclear attack: the DUGA over-the-horizon radar. This time I focus on the command centre ‒ military buildings and tools for analysing signals collected from the antennae.
I comb the zone in search of radioactive traces of the catastrophe. In the basement of a flooded laboratory in the Jupiter factory I find a mysterious radioactive substance. But that’s only the beginning, a warm-up. Then I go to the Red Forest, the most radioactive place in the zone. I have no problem finding fragments of fuel from the destroyed reactor.
Radioactive land and buildings. Plants and animals. Radiation is all around me, invisible, silent and impossible to sense in any way. But that’s not the only risk I face. Climbing up high structures, antennae, cooling tower or cranes. I’ll remember the view of the abandoned city, zone and plant for the rest of my life.
I’m never away from my camera; it’s mounted on my helmet. So everyone, not just me, can see the zone. The real zone and not only the places where official guides take you. To hear what the real inhabitants of the zone have to say and not dry statistics from institutions promoting nuclear energy. So that everyone can imagine what’s happening in Japan right now or what could happen wherever nuclear plants are, or will be, operating.
The zone is huge. I never know what the next day will bring. What I’ll uncover, where I’ll end up or who I’ll meet. My GPS system helps me find interesting places and remember their coordinates. It also enables me to return home safely. The dosimeter allows me to avoid many dangerous places where radioactive waste is hidden. It helps me keep a safe distance. I would never go anywhere without these two pieces of equipment.
This is a shortened version of the film/photo project. Full report, more photos, trailer:
http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/alone-2-premiere/ Arkadiusz
