A new exhibition now open in Kyiv gives visitors a chance to take a trip to the Chornobyl exclusion zone – but all from the safety of the Ukrainian capital.
“Chornobyl 360,” a recently opened photo and virtual reality video exhibition, is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the catastrophic explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, which contaminated vast areas of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus with radioactive fallout and blighted the lives of thousands.
The exhibition, which runs until May 14, offers visitors a detailed view of the state of nature and the lives of the people who still live in the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the decommissioned power plant.
“We called the exhibition ‘Chornobyl 360’ because it offers a view of Chornobyl from different angles,” says the producer and initiator of the project, Kyrylo Pokutnyy.
Using virtual reality helmets, visitors to the exhibition at America House in Kyiv will get an up-close view of rusty machinery in the amusement park of the abandoned town of Prypyat, see the interior of the nuclear power plant, and take a flight over the treetops in the Chornobyl zone.
The virtual reality equipment allows users move freely and turn their gaze in various directions, giving them the realistic feeling of actually being in various locations of the evacuated area.
As well as the town of Prypyat and the plant itself, the locations include the nuclear waste storage facility, the new safe confinement structure that is to enclose the destroyed fourth reactor, and the abandoned village of Paryshev.
The team of 25 young people started working on the “Chornobyl 360” project a year ago. For many of them, the nuclear catastrophe has real-life dimensions.
“Each of us has their own personal life stories connected with the Chornobyl disaster,” Pokutnyy says.
The team visited the Chornobyl exclusion zone around ten times to collect photo and video material for the exhibition. They used drones with 360-degree video cameras to capture footage, which – once stitched seamlessly together using special computer programs and augmented with interactive sound – gives users a realistic impression of what it is like to actually be in the zone.
“We decided to use interactive technologies because we wanted to attract the attention of young people to the tragedy,” Pokutnyy says.
But the exhibition won’t just be interesting to fans of modern virtual reality technology: Photographer Ivan Chernichkin, who took 20 black-and-white photos of the Chornobyl zone’s natural and industrial areas for the exhibition, says “Chornobyl 360” combines modern virtual reality technologies with a traditional photograph gallery “so that everybody can come and dive into Chornobyl’s atmosphere.”
The exhibition organizers plan to continue collecting photo and video material in more locations in the Chornobyl zone. To fund their work, they have started collecting money on Kickstarter, world’s largest crowdfunding platform.
“This is just the beginning. We plan to make an anthology of Chornobyl stories, and show people the beauty of the nature in the Polissya region,” Pokutny says.
The videos from the exhibition will soon be available on YouTube, Play Market and the App Store for free.
