Documentary conférence-performance

Premièred on 30 April National Chornobyl Museum, Kyiv

Uncertainty Zones explores the Chornobyl catastrophe through archival media materials, official documents and the testimonies of four generations of a single family. The work is part of Danylo Boiko’s independent curatorial programme, ‘Anthology of Uncertainty’.

The work approaches the Catastrophe as a point where personal and collective memory meet: remembrance, trauma, objects and silence. The work touches upon the invisible traces of political violence, the concealment of truth and the transmission of memory across generations.

The narrative unfolds in two layers. The first, social layer looks at the response of European and American media to the Catastrophe and the official position of the Soviet authorities: how two different approaches to handling information in a crisis shape collective memory. The second, psychological layer centres on four official documents belonging to members of one family across four generations. Their stories are narrated by people whose families also suffered from the Catastrophe.

The work poses questions for which there are no ready answers: what is passed down between generations – experience, trauma or an administrative category? Has anything changed in the way the state speaks to society in times of danger? Why does society remember so little of its own experience?

For a generation living through a major war with the russian federation, the Catastrophe becomes yet another example of a history of colonial and generational violence, part of a broader, as yet unfinished history.

Format: ~40-minute live performance