Culture

In the last few years, images have surfaced of street art in the abandoned city of Chernobyl, which was victim to a nuclear explosion in 1986 after a reactor malfunctioned. Like Hiroshima, the desolate landscape in Chernobyl highlights the city’s process of being moulded and manipulated, but in a very different way. The site echoes the political time period in which the accident occurred - the rise and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s - and the tremendous devastation the accident incurred. This devastation is engrained upon the hauntingly decimated urban environment. Chernobyl is an uninhabitable wasteland and a reminder of the unpredictability, lack of knowledge and unsustainability the use of nuclear power can produce.
 
Anonymous street artists have been entering the emptiness of the city still in ruins and both re-moulding its remnants through poignant reminders of its history and deliberately divorcing images from the nuclear disaster. An array of different graffiti artists have contributed to the reshaping of the city. Graffiti dispersed throughout Chernobyl highlights both the different ways in which landscapes can be regenerated and reshaped through differences in perspective, and the historical curiosity we have in such damaged landscapes.
 

The disaster at Chernobyl highlights environmental devastation and loss of life, with recent events in Northern Japan echoing the nature in which history repeats itself. With the recent disaster in Japan fresh in the mind, upon viewing images of Chernobyl one becomes angry that nuclear energy was being produced in Japan, despite the known risks of such an energy source.