Chernobyl Fractures

My work focuses on the contradictions that exist today in Chernobyl and the photographs must be seen as diptychs, two photographs side by side and the captions are very important to understand the full story.

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident on 1986 an exclusion zone was created and 116 thousand people were evacuated. The area thus became a dead zone. But today the zone is not so dead, in fact is full of life even if it is the most contaminated place in the world.

Still today there is the local population that suffers the consequences of radiations with a huge increase in pathologies, but there are also 60,000 tourists per year that come to visit the zone, that became a sort of amusement park.

4,000 people that must work and live in the zone: police, firemen, officers, employers of the nuclear power plant etc, but there are also youngsters, named Stalker, that illegally enter the zone to play survival games.

There are the Hasidic Jews that every year come on pilgrimage, because in Chernobyl the Hasidic movement, one of the most important currents of ‘Judaism, has developed in the eighteen century and the tomb of the founder is in Chernobyl City.

There is Chernobyl City that looks like a normal Ukrainian City with markets, canteen, offices, bus station, houses and hotels. But it is in the exclusion zone and all around the City abandoned places like the Chernobyl port or the ghost town of Pripyat.

And finally there is nature that has regenerated, in a changed way but in a lush form. Nature that can not be defined as uncontaminated, but here the plants, after more than 30 years of abandonment, have enveloped the city of Pripyat and the abandoned villages, and here you can meet wild animals such as wolves, foxes, bears, wild boars and elks. The Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a nature reserve, but totally unnatural. Today the Chernobyl dead zone is full of contradictions, among life and death, and lives more than ever through its contradictions and fractures.