FFF4 | Zvizdal [Chernobyl – so far so close]

Bart Baele and Yves Degryse founded the Berlin Group in 2003 in Belgium, along with Caroline Rochlitz. Their projects incorporate theatre, film, visual art and music.

Every Berlin project takes a highly specific place, city or part of the planet as its starting point. Their first cycle of works, entitled "Holocene" (after the current geological era), has to date included the following projects: "Jerusalem", "Iqualuit" (the smallest regional capital in Canada in terms of population, it was founded in 1942 as a US military base), "Bonanza" (a small Rocky Mountain community in Colorado, US), "Moscow" and "Zvizdal". The second cycle, which bears the umbrella title "Horror Vacui", has already featured three productions: "Tagfish", "Land’s End" and "Perhaps All the Dragons". Berlin are currently preparing new productions for both cycles.

When the French journalist and theatre critic Cathy Blisson left "Telerama" magazine, she decided to return to Chernobyl, which she has written about in the past. It was Blisson who first spoke to Berlin about the two solitary inhabitants of the Ukrainian village of Zbizntal. Together, they created the film about the life of Pyotr and Nadia.

"The camera will never enter the house": this was the condition Pyotr and Nadia set when Berlin sought their permission to film their lives.

Three revolving models which represent the couple's farm in ZVizntal in three different seasons (summer, winter, autumn) are positioned beneath the screen on which the film is shown. From time to time, the models interact with the filmed material via a GoPro camera.

According to a recent Greenpeace exhibition, some 5 million people currently live in those parts of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine that were contaminated by the radioactivity released at Chernobyl.

Jerusalem was the project with which Berlin introduced themselves to Greek audiences in the context of the Onassis Stegi 1st Fast Forward Festival in May 2014. A performance-film and visual instillation, Berlin called "Jerusalem" the "portrait of a city". It consists of an unusual combination of video filmed in Jerusalem (including everything from the Wailing Wall to the Palestinian camps) and interviews with local Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants. Berlin visited the city in 2003 and created a first version of the project. When they returned in 2013, they drew on new material and recorded new statements from the people they had interviewed ten years earlier in order to explore the socio-political changes that had occurred over the intervening decade.