project wormwood
Chernobyl News in Hungarian
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 | decay, project wormwood | 3 Comments
This is pretty amazing: A fellow Chernobyl enthusiast from Hungary translated my Chernobyl journal into Hungarian:
So that’s the reason why I’m getting all those Hungarian visitors… thank you Kornel!
His blog is also worth a visit: Pripjaty & Csernobil
Chernobyl Journal: Epilogue
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | odds and ends, project wormwood, updates | 2 Comments
After three months of intense publishing, the Chernobyl Journal is now finished. In order to make it easier to read and find, I have collected all material around the trip on a special page. You will also find separate pages for pictures, videos and sounds alone.
Thank you!
My great thanks goes out to my fellow zone travellers, Beat, René and Laura, for pulling this project through – I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to the Chernobyl InterInform team – especially Yuriy – for the amazing tour and the freedom we had to explore the zone. Thanks to Robert for borrowing me a Geiger counter to keep us safe. Thanks to the organizers of the Pecha-Kucha Basel Night for allowing me to show my pictures. Thanks to all of you who commented, shared, corrected mistakes, translated Russian, and spread the word. And a big, big thanks to my wife, my favorite art critic, who had to bear me geeking out on Cherno-stuff week after week and still supported me and kept me sane. You’re all amazing – THANK YOU!
So, what’s next?
For now, my plan is to enjoy the summer, and concentrate on some more sound recordings (I’ve got a new microphone, which I really want to try out) . There are at least two short movies from previous locations in the making (a brewery and a potassium mine). My backlog of pictures from the last three years is still huge, so expect more decay photographs. I also might take a dip into abstract photography, because I’ve become increasingly fascinated with it.
As for my plans for the Chernobyl material, I am planning to organize an exhibition within a couple of months, and am playing with the idea of publishing part of the journal as a book. Stay tuned.
“Ghosts of Prypiat”, by Carlos Latuff
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | artists, project wormwood | 1 Comment
Over DeviantArt, I was contacted by Carlos Latuff, a political cartoonist and photographer from Brazil. We talked about Chernobyl, and he decided to draw a special artwork based on one of my pictures from Pripyat. I feel really flattered!
Be sure to check out Latuff’s other artwork on DeviantArt, very powerful (and Creative Commons licensed)!
"Ghosts of Prypiat" by Carlos Latuff
Chernobyl Journal #12: Fire & Militia Station
Friday, June 26th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal | No Comments
This is part twelve of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.Wormwood category.
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Beat and I re-grouped at the van and took a break. A quick phone call to Laura and René revealed that they were still exploring Pripyat roofs, so we asked Yuriy if he could take us to the old fire station in the southwest for half an hour. The station was nothing special – a large hall for the (absent) fire trucks and some adjacent common rooms (one of them full of soft drink bottles).
On the other side of the road however was a much more interesting site: Pripyat’s old militia station, which was full of old vehicles: Cars, buses, trucks, dredgers, even a small tank BRDM-2D combat vehicle. There were further vehicles on top of the militia building, and I still have no idea how they got up there. I was initially worried that the radiation around those vehicles would be very high, as metal absorbs radioactivity better, but it wasn’t. This meant that they hadn’t been used during the accident, and all of those vehicles had been moved to the old junkyard at the border of the zone.
Photo Albums
Album: Fire Station
Album: Militia Station
Map for this Journal Entry
The Chernobyl Journal will conclude next week.
Chernobyl Journal #11: Music and Mirrors
Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | decay, gallery, hdr, project wormwood, sounds, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part eleven of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.category.
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Leaving the docks, I went on to the cinema/theater complex to the north. In front of it must have been a large gathering area, probably with fountains, which was now a collection of concrete plates with yellow grass between them. On the side of the cinema, there was a large red-and-blue Soviet mosaic on the wall. Unfortunately, the lighting inside the cinema was almost absent, and I couldn’t get a good shot of the projection room (Beat has a picture of the room, I don’t know how long he had to expose in there!). Not surprisingly, its closed nature made the cinema one of the spots in Pripyat with the lowest radiation levels I had measured (<0.1 uSv/h, lower than my living room).
Chernobyl Journal #10: Pripyat Port
Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | decay, project wormwood, sounds, travel journal | No Comments
This is part ten of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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After seeing the school, I decided to go explore Pripyat port to the east. The port must have been a beautiful spot back in 1986. Located at the River Pripyat, a café with a round outside terrace overlooked the passenger dock, accessible via a wide stairway [that's how it looked in 1986]. From a ship passenger’s point of view, the city entrance had been through a gate flanked by the café on the left side and the dock’s tower to the right side, and V-shaped columns in the middle. A bus stop and ticket office used to be right after the gate.
Chernobyl Journal Featured on WebUrbanist
Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | decay, project wormwood, reviews | No Comments
WebUrbanist.com, my favorite webzine on architecture and urban art, has just published a new “fanbase artist showcase”. This edition included my Chernobyl Journal. From the other featured artists, I especially like Pim Palsgraaf‘s “Multiscapes”, which combines architectural models with taxidermy.
Chernobyl Journal #9: The Other School
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part nine of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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After wandering around the hospital for two hours, I went back to the van, where our InterInform colleagues were waiting (the driver was busy playing handheld video games). I discovered some radioactive hot spots in the moss before the clinic which Yuriy confirmed with his Geiger counter. He then offered to show us “school #1″, another large complex just opposite of the hospital. › Continue reading
Pecha Kucha Reviews
Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | decay, events, gallery, project wormwood, video | No Comments
Participating in Basel’s first Pecha Kucha Night was great. The PK rules – present 20 slides for 20 seconds each – impose a set of boundaries that makes presenting a completely different experience than your usual Powerpoint spiel: There’s just too much going on to have stage fright, it’s all about the excitement of making the most of the 20 x 20 seconds.
Pecha Kucha Daily has a nice overview with event photos about the evening.
I’m especially pleased with the great review the Tagesanzeiger, one of Switzerland’s biggest newspapers, wrote about the event and my presentation:
“He shows what probably no one in the audience – around 100 people – has ever seen: A deserted classroom, children’s respirators, an amusement park that was never used, the totally irradiated forest – everything in close proximity to the decomissioned reactor, deserted, in unbelievably warm colors, and at the same time icy cold in its mood. Suess manages to distract even the chatterers at the back of the room and make a big impact with his entertaining performance.” (translated from German)
If you haven’t seen the slide deck, here it is.
The next event is on October 22nd, again in “Unternehmen Mitte” in Basel. Put it in your calendars!
Chernobyl Journal #8: Pripyat Hospital
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, travel journal, video | No Comments
This is part eight of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.
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We spent most of the rest of the day in Pripyat’s north-east. The old Pripyat hospital was one of the biggest and most rewarding locations we visited. It consisted of five large buildings, about 6 stories high, all interconnected. The layout was rectangular so that one large corridor with rooms to each side lead through the whole length, flanked by two staircases at the side. In the middle of the buildings were open entrance areas, which seemed to have been used as common rooms or receptions. Almost every room was filled with medical equipment, from beds, cupboards, medicine bottles, autoclaves to whole operation rooms. › Continue reading
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