Kyiv
1 - 6 February 2022
Just two weeks before the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, I was visiting Kyiv and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It was there where I started this travel notebook in which I mix analog photos from the Polaroid SX-70 with drawings, intervened photographs, texts in which I narrate the day-to-day journey and some cyanotypes. The ring binding and the color palette in gray and blue tones aim to give it an industrial, cold and chaotic touch, like the demolished houses and the sterile and aseptic context that surrounded me at that time.
As a curious detail: the radioactive particles that invade the Chernobyl exclusion zone, affected the development of the photographic film and created strange notches, dots and lines in the snapshots, which were obscured in some areas. This way, an unexpected dialogue is established between the place visited and the notebook, which gains autonomy.
Following the same idea of the work as a piece that takes on a life of its own beyond the wishes and intentions of the artist, I decided to carry out a manual binding in which the paper with black and white dots used on the cover and endpapers takes on a special meaning. relevance. This isn’t a choice left to chance: the notches in the paper are reminiscent of the stains of the particles that cover the photographs, in a constant repetition of the circular figure, the chaotic and the unpredictable.
To further reinforce the concept of the unexpected and making another reference to the radiation we found in Chernobyl, the cover is made with green phosphorescent inks that are only visible when the notebook is in complete darkness. In it we can read “Kyiv” in Cyrillic, written in a thick and very forceful font.
1 - 6 February 2022
Just two weeks before the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, I was visiting Kyiv and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It was there where I started this travel notebook in which I mix analog photos from the Polaroid SX-70 with drawings, intervened photographs, texts in which I narrate the day-to-day journey and some cyanotypes. The ring binding and the color palette in gray and blue tones aim to give it an industrial, cold and chaotic touch, like the demolished houses and the sterile and aseptic context that surrounded me at that time.
As a curious detail: the radioactive particles that invade the Chernobyl exclusion zone, affected the development of the photographic film and created strange notches, dots and lines in the snapshots, which were obscured in some areas. This way, an unexpected dialogue is established between the place visited and the notebook, which gains autonomy.
Following the same idea of the work as a piece that takes on a life of its own beyond the wishes and intentions of the artist, I decided to carry out a manual binding in which the paper with black and white dots used on the cover and endpapers takes on a special meaning. relevance. This isn’t a choice left to chance: the notches in the paper are reminiscent of the stains of the particles that cover the photographs, in a constant repetition of the circular figure, the chaotic and the unpredictable.
To further reinforce the concept of the unexpected and making another reference to the radiation we found in Chernobyl, the cover is made with green phosphorescent inks that are only visible when the notebook is in complete darkness. In it we can read “Kyiv” in Cyrillic, written in a thick and very forceful font.
