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Diana Thater's images revisit the site of nuclear disaster, capturing the eroded architecture and persisting wildlife of a one-hundred-mile-wide radioactive territory.
Dazed Digital: You’ve said in the past how interested you are by the relationship between the human and natural world. What is it that you find so fascinating?
Diana Thater: The natural world is the only true unknown. There is always this discussion of the Asian person, or the black person, or the-this-or-the-that person being the ‘other’. But they are not ‘others’ at all. The only ‘other’ we actually have is animal. They are completely unknowable – we don’t know anything about their consciousness. We can speculate, but we don’t really know.
Is this interest the reason why you decided to do a project on Chernobyl?
Yeah, of course. Chernobyl is the only post-apocalyptic, or post-human landscape on earth. Today it’s falling into ruins, but it still looks like a city; there’s stores, apartment buildings, schools. And even though it’s completely deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. So, on the one hand you have this perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970, and on the other hand you have this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living.
How long where you there filming for?
Seven days, and a preliminary visit of two days in the summer.
While you were there what kind of feelings did you experience?
It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I’ve worked in Central Africa, I’ve worked with tigers and done things that people consider ‘dangerous’, but this was the hardest. When you go to Chernobyl it’s incredibly depressing. It has something of a concentration camp feeling because there are things like piles of children’s shoes and rusted baby beds in maternity hospitals. My assistant had to leave – it was too much for her. She was living in Chernobyl in 1986 when the explosion happened, and we went back to her apartment and found a calendar from that year. She remembered it all.
Is this piece political? Does it say that something good can come from such a horrific and terrible event?
I think it’s both political and cultural. Chernobyl represents the failure of lots of things – a massive political system, a way of life, of science. Yet even with the human failures, nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.
Is the video trying to say that nature will always persist then?
That’s a hope!
Diana Thater, excerpt from Dazed Digital interview (by Alana Marmion-Warr), on the subject of her 2011 video installation Chernobyl, at Hauser & Wirth, London
Chernobyl, Camera Focus Plant: photo by Diana Thater, 2010 (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London)
Whoever rubs his hands with humility and satisfaction while remembering the sinking of the Titanic, because the iceberg supposedly dealt the first blow to the idea of progress, forgets or suppresses the fact that this accident, which incidentally was by no means fateful, occasioned measures that in the following half century protected sea voyages from unplanned natural catastrophes. Part of the dialectic of progress is that historical setbacks which themselves are instigated by the principle of progress -- what could be more progressive than the race for the blue ribbon? -- also provide the condition needed for humanity to find the means to avert them in the future. The nexus of deception surrounding progress reaches beyond itself. It is mediated to that order in which the category of progress would first gain its justification, in that the devastation wrought by progress can be made good again, if at all, only by its own forces, never by the restoration of the preceding conditions that were its victim. The progress of the domination of nature that, in Benjamin's simile, proceeds in the reverse direction of that true progress that would have its telos in redemption, nevertheless is not entirely without hope. Both concepts of progress communicate with each other not only in averting the ultimate disaster, but rather in every actual form of easing the persistent suffering.
Theodor Adorno: excerpt from Progress, Lecture at Münster Philosophers' Congress, 22 October 1962, translated by Henry Pickford in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 1998
Abandoned movie theatre in Prypiat, city founded to house Chernobyl plant workers: photo by Diana Thater, 2010 (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London)