[-empyre-] Chernobyl Project

[Alice Miceli <alicemiceli@terra.com.br>]

Hello,

Thanks to Tim and Renate for the invitation and for the introduction.  
I am very glad to take part in this very active discussion. Sorry for  
taking a little while to post this statement. Please excuse my “weird  
English”.

I agree with Maurice, for sure, that “criticality” belongs to very  
nature of any artistic engagement, in general. I was then wondering  
how “critical spatial practice” would particularly relate to my  
ongoing work, the “Chernobyl Project”, and it seems to me that it is  
in the very base of the work, as it attempts to produce critical  
specific images of a very critical space, the Chernobyl Exclusion  
Zone, in Belarus. The Chernobyl zone is, indeed, critical in many  
different layers - from an ecological and technological to a  
humanitarian point of view. This critical space is not one that  
easily lets its images be created, as the question of “visibility” is  
also central here. But, at first, I should state a brief description:

The Chernobyl Project is based on issues related to radiation in the  
Chernobyl exclusion zone, especially on the Byelorussian side. Its  
aim is to produce radiographic images of the zone, exposed through  
the very radiation that has intoxicated this “space”. In order to  
make this happen, we are testing two different techniques: a  
specially designed led pinhole camera that is totally closed to light  
and “sees” invisible gamma radiation. We are also working on another  
technique for imprinting invisible gamma radiation emitted by  
contaminated matter: the direct contact between an appropriate  
radiographic film and the right radioactivity energy level. In both  
techniques, the invisible, high-level gamma radiation present in the  
exclusion zone is the only source of film exposure. It will produce  
images of the "invisible". Images of a certain kind of energy present  
in this space and yet totally invisible except for the destruction  
traces it leaves behind.

How to look at a very intriguing place, the exclusion zone, in a  
specific way, specific to that place? A deserted, abandoned zone.  
Empty, yet filled with something invisible. I thought about what had  
happened there. This evil energy, where was it, where were its  
traces? Is it possible to sense it, to touch the immaterial, the  
invisible? It crossed my mind that this vast “waste ground” had  
become a place where this invisible matter could not be contained any  
longer. The “Chernobyl Project” attempts to make this visible.  
Visibility / invisibility is our core concept. Physical visibility -  
considering that we are developing techniques to  “see” the  
invisible, to see an invisible matter; but also social-political  
visibility, considering that even though the reactor is across the  
border, in Ukraine, contamination is at higher levels in Belarus, a  
country that is even less socially visible than its neighbor.  
Globally, the public opinion and the European countries fail to  
recognize, let alone address, this problem. Something that was not  
only a traumatic event in the past - it is a current, urgent  
situation, and it will continue to be for hundred of years.

Finally, getting back to the focus of our discussion here, the  
question that the Chernobyl Project asks is how to critically look at  
a critical space. That’s the first layer. Further on, I would also  
like to comment a second layer: in producing an account of this  
process, in the form of an online journal posted at a blog (http:// 
www.jblog.com.br/chernobyl2.php) I was also confronted with the  
question of transfiguring this quest to the form a virtual space. It  
begins like this:

“This blog starts with the beginning of a journey. It will present  
simultaneously a journal of my travels and the creative process of  
the work. My destination is the exclusion zone of Chernobyl. I will  
be leaving in a week to Belarus, for the first contact with the  
exclusion zone, which is right on the border between Belarus and  
Ukraine.
To step into somewhere called “exclusion zone” presents, in itself, a  
problem. I hope you will be interested in joining me on the way as it  
unravels. The posts will, by and by, shape the virtual space here  
initiated.
Bill Viola, the pope of video art, has published his working journal  
entitled Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. I thought: there are  
many reasons for knocking on the doors of a ghost city, on the doors  
of an excluded, deserted zone. What is this place? What happens  
there? How could I generate specific images of a place devastated by  
an extensive but invisible energy, only noticeable through its tracks  
of destruction?
With luck, after bumping many times on corners, edges, traces of  
unidentified things, it might be viable to find and turn on a switch  
somewhere that in shedding light in the room might connect the dots.  
To work!”

Thinking that this whole endeavor is a leap into the unknown, into a  
negative space, into something that comes to being, to a form, as we  
look, the idea was to shape the virtual space of the blog as the  
works develops. To begin with, by an active appropriation of the  
general default form of blogs, developing post by post, but also in  
making that these posts, being written white on a totally black  
background, are the only orientation marks a visitor come across with  
to guide himself, little by little, in this virtual space, as a  
“cybernetic stalker”.

Hopefully, the discussion of Chernobyl Project in relation to  
“critical space practices” will interest you. I would be very glad to  
take it further.
Thank you.

Alice