The Belgian collective Berlin was founded in 2003 by Bart Baele and Yves Degryse. Every theater piece they make is tied to a specific city or region, yet always involves their characteristic documentary and interdisciplinary approach, reflected on stage through the use of video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zvizdal<\/em> is the result of five years of filming in the village of the same name. From 2011 to 2016, a team made up of Bart Baele, Yves Degryse and Cathy Blisson \u2014French journalist, dramaturge and writer specialized in hybrid artistic projects that straddle performing and visual arts\u2014regularly went to visit the elderly couple P\u00e9tro and Nadia in Zvizdal to film their day-to-day. The couple was nearly 90 years old at that time, which means they were about 60 when the explosion occurred\u2014the advanced aging of their cells most likely explains why the effects of radiation have remained invisible on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zvizdal<\/em> is the final show in the \u201cHolocene\u201d series, named after the geological epoch that spans the past ten thousand years, although some scientists now refer to the \u201cAnthropocene\u201d to describe the past three centuries marked by human activity. It acts as a transition to the next series, \u201cHorror Vacui\u201d\u2014fear of emptiness. The film is an attempt to accept and appropriate this supposed emptiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of the villages within a 30-kilometer radius of Pripyat\u2014a city located 3 kilometers from the nuclear site and created in 1970 to house the plant\u2019s employees\u2014were evacuated in 1986. The solitude of this place comes through in the elderly couple\u2019s monologues, their endless waiting, their joy at the sight of a car driving past\u2014the closest populated area is about twenty kilometers away. This solitude is made even more palpable through the stage concept, which is void of any human presence. There are no actors: P\u00e9tro and Nadia speak to the public unmediated, aside from the digital aspect of projecting the documentary. One screen and three mobile stages with scaled models of their home during three different seasons: autumn, winter and summer. The spectator enters this site, evacuated in 1986, by way of two cameras: one that films Nadia and P\u00e9tro, and another one, mobile, that zooms onto screens placed throughout the set, sweeping across plastic figurines of a cow, a dog, a tree, a man and a woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The set-up for recording and transmitting the couple\u2019s daily life is in stark contrast with the actual daily life in question. P\u00e9tro and Nadia are isolated, without electricity, heat or running water, no Internet or other technology. They live in a zone where nature has reclaimed the abandoned houses\u2014the lushness of the vegetation is surprising, it hardly corresponds with the image one might have of ground zero<\/em>. And yet technology, usually absent from their routine, is what infiltrates their home and re-broadcasts images to the public. The subtitle \u201cChernobyl\u2014so far so close\u201d emphasizes this feeling that only the camera has been grated access to the couple, their village and their home, as if nothing but \u201cvacuum technology\u201d\u2014the term for physical technologies required to produce, regulate and measure emptiness\u2014could survive such nuclear silence. Most images from the zone have actually, until recently, been recorded by drones, like those by American filmmaker Philip Grossman in the documentary Lost City of Chernobyl<\/em> (2015) about the nuclear exclusion zone, or those by British director Danny Cooke of an abandoned playground, children\u2019s toys and gas masks left astray for his short film Postcards From Chernobyl<\/em> (2014), as well as those used for the post-apocalyptic film sets created by Scottish director Colm McCarthy, in the adaptation of British author M. R Carey\u2019s eponymous novel, The Girl with All the Gifts<\/em> (2016). Wherever the drone shows the disappearance of life, Berlin\u2019s cameras reinfuses it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Berlin\u2019s choice to reproduce the consequences of faulty technology\u2014it was the unmonitored increase in one reactor\u2019s pressure that led to the entire plant exploding\u2014through a stage concept that combines various technical and digital recording and broadcasting techniques, accentuates the media\u2019s silence surrounding the event and which continues to surround the \u201cun-displaced\u201d. A silence that translates first and foremost into an illusion, or perhaps a denial, of the catastrophe, like in France, where media outlets reported the radioactive cloud would not pass through the \u2018Hexagon\u2019. Even today, we still cannot measure the true impact of this radiation and have no idea whether the nuclear exclusion zone might one day become habitable again. According to historian Galia Ackerman, the area will not be completely rid of plutonium 239 residue, one of the toxic radioactive substances, for another 240 000 years. Nearly 250 000 people were displaced or relocated outside of this zone immediately following the accident, such as P\u00e9tro and Nadia\u2019s daughter and neighbors, who appear only briefly in the film. Nadia and P\u00e9tro were also amongst them at first, but they decided to return, determined to stay in their native village despite the ban, the health risks and completely destitute isolation. There are about a thousand people who have returned in this way. They are nicknamed \u201csamosely\u201d (self-settlers). Their struggle is one of the earth, the hearth, a refusal to be displaced that echoes the situation of refugees throughout the world and is a reminder of the uprooting and loss that accompanies migration and other forced displacements resulting from conflicts, natural catastrophes or expropriations. The documentary White Horse <\/em>(2008) by American filmmaker Maryann DeLeo and French artist Christophe Bisson films the return of Maxym Surkov, a Ukranian evacuated from Pripyat in 1986, to his home village. A calendar from the year 1986 is still attached to the wall in his childhood apartment, and he rips out almost every page, or at least everything after April 26, the day after which \u201cthis place ceases to exist\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover : ZVIZDAL, 2019, \u00a9 FREDERIK BUYCKX<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Belgian collective Berlin was founded in 2003 by Bart Baele and Yves Degryse. Every theater piece they make is tied to a specific city or region, yet always involves their characteristic documentary and interdisciplinary approach, reflected on stage through the use of video. 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