by Elena Filatova
On April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in the Ukrainian spring sky. On Elena Filatova’s motorbike, we will go through the area affected by the radiations, across the deserts, villages, streets and cities that today are still in a terrible silence. They are the remains of the most serious nuclear disaster in the history of humanity.
“Elena Filatova is the daughter of a nuclear physicist. At that time she was a little girl. After the incident, her father put her on a train and sent her by relatives, almost a thousand miles away. The area we are talking about – 300 km north-south and 100 km west-east – is what Elena says she explored with her Ninja, a Kawasaki ZZR-1100 that she modified. In this journey into the underworld Elena is our female Virgil, a Virgil riding a black motorcycle. Here, the “journalistic” truth, the exasperated – and indeed impossible – need to control the truthfulness of any information exhausts its limit and value; no one is here to impose a single version of the facts. This is not the only possible world: it is one of many. In working at this project, I never stopped believing that the material in this book was exciting and extraordinary, as this story is extraordinary, with all the weight that a disaster like Chernobyl still stands today on our shoulders and on the shoulders of the generations to come.” (Massimiliano Sorrentini)
This book is in Italian and comes with English parallel text.
