Alice Miceli is not your ordinary artist. Her work consists more of science than of art, but don’t think in any way that her pieces are cold or inhuman. Truly, they show sometimes the worst in humanity, destruction that laid an area of 30 km bare and uninhabitable, but congruously an immense hope for the future. Miceli’s work now is an in-progress project stretching from her home country of Brazil to here in Germany, to the Exclusion Zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant in the Ukraine and Belarus; she hopes to capture images of radiation, something that no one has yet done before.
Miceli has been directing the development of one-of-a-kind pinhole cameras that will capture these images. Though the pinhole camera is not a new technology, and is fairly basic in design, using it in this capacity is a wholly new concept. Radiation has qualities like light, but the right film must be found to properly absorb the radiation in the same way that light is imprinted on normal film. Long exposure times - from two weeks up to two years - are also needed to properly imprint the images. The cameras must be small or large enough for the object it is photographing, and range in sizes. The radiographic image appears as a shadow of the contaminated object, or as a low level radiation dust laid over the ground.
Radiation can be detected by meters, but the real effect it has had and still has in and around the Exclusion Zone are yet to be fully shown. Nothing at first would alert someone strolling through the Zone that there were extremely high levels of radiation still affecting the entire area. The destroying force of it is unseen except for the remnants it leaves: Miceli is dealing with both social and physical visibility. Though the reactor was in the Ukraine, most of the radiation found its way to Belarus, a country far less visible in the public sphere. ‘There are people still living very close to what is marked as the Exclusion Zone, but the radiation does not end at the fences and markers,’ she explains. Children from the area collect highly contaminated mushrooms to eat from within the Zone, these people are so poor that they have no way to leave and nowhere else to go. Cancer is rampant. Life expectancy is extremely low. The situation in Belarus and around Chernobyl continues to deteriorate but has been virtually forgotten by the rest of the world.
Going into a radioactive zone is not for the faint of heart. ‘I had no idea of the extent of the danger,’ said Miceli, ‘how was I crossing something with a big red DANGER sign?’ Anyone else would have turned back, but she has gone into the Zone and will return again in the future to place her cameras and collect data.
You can find out more about Alice Miceli and her works at the Transmediale 08 Exhibition until February 24th and online here .
Miceli/January 28th at Upgrade!Berlin with an example of her older work on the Phnom Penh Prison/Cambodia/photo: Julie Shipley
