rbmk
theatre / digital video and 8 mm film
Archive. Chernobyl. April 26, 1986. h.01m.23.sec.40 Explosion of bock number four. Maximum calculated accident. Fifty tons of long-life radio nuclides vaporize into air. Ten Hiroshimas. Seventy tons of nuclear combustible burn. A big black enflamed sphere spins in the sky. Seven hundred tons of graphite deposit. Radioactivity reaches 1500 roentgen an hour. Orange night. Gamma irradiation. Bitumen spills from the ripped roof of the power station. Extinguish. Bury up the reactor. Wash. Streets. Men, women. Hospital wards. Suppress. Radioactive dogs and pigs. Evacuate. Liquidators. 6,500 men arrive from the whole country. There are no tight-proof overalls, nor gas masks. The high radiations put robots out of order. Graphite is collected with shovels. Sarcophagus. The RBMK reactor is enclosed in 250,000 tons of concrete. Sarcophagus. Sarcos, flesh. Phagein, eat.
Twenty years after the accident, on the eve of the umpteenth, inevitable celebration, in composing we chose to be inspired by touch. Experience which cannot be mediated. Today experience has turned into memory, and we feel the need to look into the human territory of what survived and was lost, keeping a research process alive between memory and forgetfulness. Transforming memory into a communal space means contemplating the human being in the fragility of its existence. Beyond an identity of history, on the common ground of loss. Memory is the mystery of the human being in time, the constant effort of raising a monument over every burial. Memory is the tragedy of the human being in time, hero between beginning and end.
An expedition (august-september 2005) to which all the artists participated accompanied by direct witnesses of the accident, of the evacuation and of the reoccupation of the contaminated territories, crossed the evacuated area, to the sarcophagus enclosing the rbmk reactor. The experience was documented through a digital video and on 8mm film. Rehearsals of the performance started in the gym of the Narovla primary school, thirty kilometres from the power plant. Technologies for the performance were studied to allow for an open interaction between video documents, sound, and the physical memory of the actors on stage.