Chernobyl, selfies and radioactive raves: The art project illuminating our dark obsession with disaster

Lasers danced across a teetering steel structure and poi dancers swirled fluorescent batons. At the foot of this spectacle was a ringmaster – artist and DJ Valeriy Korshunov, clad in a gold cape – sending a trance soundtrack whirling into the tainted air.

It was as if Burning Man, or at least a part of Glastonbury, had landed in this unlikely festival site – the Duga radar in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. Korshunov’s company Artefact’s aim was to create the “largest digital sculpture in the world”, and in doing so, he put on this “radioactive rave”. On the face of it a resistible offer, something powerful propelled me into this tainted space to witness Korshunov’s sinister but sublime son et lumiere on the vast metal frame.

A danse macabre it might have been, but Korshunov’s post-fallout piece is part of a national florescence. Ukraine, Europe’s second poorest country, is presenting itself anew to the world and one can make the case that 2019 has seen the emergence of “cool Ukrainia” (as it turns out, its country branding was inspired by the UK’s efforts). With EU accession on the cards, Ukraine is having a cultural moment that repudiates the world of “fake news”, associated with the old Soviet overlords and their supporters.

And much of this process involves wresting Chernobyl from the wreckage of Soviet propaganda. The high-rolling president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, an ex-actor and comedian who last year won his post by a landslide, stated in July his intention to promote the exclusion zone as a tourist site with walking trails and enhanced mobile phone coverage – as if he were the marketing manager of the National Trust. “Chernobyl has been a negative part of Ukraine’s brand,” said Zelensky. “The time has come to change this.”

Sure enough, there are now about 20 or so providers, all vetted and vying with each other to take tourists on the two-hour drive from capital Kiev. Even the Trump-Biden scandal doesn’t seem to have dented the interest.

I met Korshunov and his partner Sveta Korshunova at the Ostannya Barykada​ restaurant in Maidan Square: a capsule of cool Ukrainia found via a Narnia-like door from an underpass. Romantically, the name translates as “The Last Barricade”, and even the menu was loaded with hope and change: “A place for free-thinking representatives of the new generation… born of three modern revolutions, the student revolution in 1990, the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014.”

Some, with a dreary inevitability, are calling Kiev the “new Berlin”. A stretch perhaps, but Kiev does have that breakthrough feeling that the German capital had two decades ago. The roads are not packed, the prices cheap and there’s also a geopolitical rush: a Nato logo on a roundabout, the moving wall of fallen soldiers killed in action in the war-torn eastern region of Donbas by St Volodymyr’s Cathedral.

Over shots and chicken kiev, Valeriy and Sveta talk about why they’re using Chernobyl as a site-specific arts space. “It’s a way of redressing the ‘information disaster’,” says Valeriy. “Many schoolkids here didn’t even learn about Chernobyl at school. We all still have a lot of pain inside us. It’s a national trauma and every family has their own story about it.” Often, adds Sveta, foreign visitors still don’t even know that Chernobyl is in Ukraine. “They think it’s in Russia. Or they don’t think about where it is at all.” Some even think it’s in a fictive Soviet sci-fi space like “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker. Clearly the smart thing with such an enormous event is to reclaim it, give it a sense of place, and represent Chernobyl as a dynamic site of regained nationhood.

Still, the pair tell me, one shouldn’t go to Chernobyl lightly. Okay, 90,000 “disaster tourists” are expected in 2019, and 60,000 came last year – although one Kiev-based journalist cast doubt on this tourism miracle. “It’s a bit exaggerated,” he said. “Even if it boomed I think it’s only got capacity for about 120,000 people a year.” Despite the push given by the HBO series, there’s passionate debate about whether Chernobyl actually will become the “Pompeii of the nuclear age”.

Although there’s a reasonably busy side-trip market from Kiev and a twin pricing structure: Ukrainians pay $40 while foreigners pay $120. For many of the overseas visitors, the scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident has become an atomic muse – an Instagrammable post-apocalypse wasteland for aficionados of “ruin porn”, while in Ukraine it’s a shrine to the unloved past.

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Our trip to the Korshunov’s radioactive rave departs a suburban “sleeping district” in Kiev bearing a coachload of young Ukrainian media. En route, there’s a briefing. “To take anything is criminal,” says Marina, part of the PR detail. “Our prisons are not nice places to stay. Follow the guides. No eating or drinking. And no guns.”

Whatever the truth of those tourism numbers, Sveta confirms that Chernobyl has become a bucket-list destination for edgy millennials. “Two tourists even climbed Duga radar and fell off,” she says. “They had been drinking and climbing.” That’s a bid for immortality – the Duga is 150 metres high, dilapidated and within the exclusion zone, a place where trust had been destroyed.

Were radiation levels really safe? “In much of the exclusion zone it’s normal,” says Sveta. “But there are some places with higher radiation spots.” Metal is bad. Dust is bad. Don’t put your bag on the ground. Don’t eat, just in case something lands on your sandwich and ends up inside you. Keep to the cleared bits of concrete, don’t pat the dogs and alarmingly: “If you smell ozone leave this place.”

The Soviet response to Chernobyl at the time was hardly even news, let alone fake news. Several days elapsed before the scale of the accident was admitted and even the architect of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, was implicated – although anyone would have been inhibited by the all-encompassing Soviet information system. “Did you know Pravda means ‘truth’?” says Sveta, referring to the Soviet newspaper, a key source at the time. “Like George Orwell and the Ministry of Truth.”

Sure, and as a Kiev resident who lived in Russia at the time told me, people started relying on hearsay and clues, such as a lack of milk at the market. Russia is piqued enough to announce that it will make its own anti-US version of the miniseries to counter its reputational hit, while for Artefact, it had been a bit of a trial working with the Chernobyl authorities. “They have very old principles,” says Sveta. “Very Soviet style. The exclusion zone is a bit stuck in the mud.”

There’s quite a lot of mud. The exclusion zone is about 2,600 square kilometres (1,000 square metres) – about the size of Derbyshire, say – and large enough to get lost. The road to the zone reveals a flatland of steppes with almost empty roads and forests, the occasional village and roundabouts whose sole adornment is a billboard advertising a Chernobyl tour company. Eventually, our charabanc arrives at a manned barrier, where a burly soldier checks papers. The experience is like a Cold War theme park, with authentic radiation.

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I alight the bus to browse two souvenir stalls, both in Chernobyl yellow – the colour of radiation warnings and half the Ukrainian flag, marking the experience with a kind of mordant humour. Alongside the stalls is a terrace for coffee with the radiation symbol on the chairs. At a kiosk I buy a bumper sticker and a patch, but leave the T-shirt with the Coca Cola symbol that reads: “See Chernobyl, die later”.

Beyond the gate, into the exclusion zone, the same satanic steppes loom, with ditches and small roads cut at right angles. These country roads take us to the Chernobyl site, still manned and bearing a new mural called “Looking Into the Future”, again directed by Korshunov and depicting a hand holding a kind of kryptonite-like object juxtaposed against running wolves – an essay on nature’s resurgence.

At this site the throwback Soviet atmosphere is completed by a military man asking people not to take photographs. “Not of the roof, please. Security. Take over there instead,” he says, gesturing beyond the reactor itself – capped by a huge cover known as the “sarcophagus” four years ago – to a track of pylons which once took the electricity away and like something you’d see from the A13 to Essex. We have borscht (sour soup) in what was once the nuclear workers’ canteen: perhaps the one time you beg the produce not to be locally sourced.

The deputy director of the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, Anna Korolevskaya, tells me that she’s had a busy side-hustle as a consultant for HBO and the various other films, and confirms that the museum has seen a 40 per cent rise in visitors. But she sombrely acknowledges a problem. “The tourism should be more respectful,” she says. “Most tourists are OK but it’s not right to make it into entertainment.” And, as Korolevskaya says, the milk in some parts of Ukraine is still affected, but just how much is, as she puts it, “closed information”.

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The creepy abandoned town of Pripyat is the heart of the Instagram apocalypse. As the coach speeds past the empty flats the Geiger counter beats a merciless tattoo as the guide tells us that we are close to the “red forest”: the worst area of fallout in 1986 that left the trees molten and russet.

“Pripyat was the city of the future in Soviet propaganda,” says Valeriy. “It was once a utopia, a white town.” On the ground, you could see how the 50,000-strong “Atomgrad”, built in 1970, had been one of the best places to live in the Soviet Union. Now, this hot-zone Harlow has become the centre of the tourism effort, complete with artfully placed dolls to complete the horror. In the radioactive gloom, buses disgorge their tourist cargo as Korolevskaya’s Geiger counter rattles like an angry snake. It’s photogenic in that ruin-porn way, but the weird silence and sheer invisibility of danger, inculcates a sense of claustrophobia – even (perhaps especially) in the open air.

After Geigers and cameras have clicked their worst, we depart to the Duga radar, 25 minutes away and a vast steel structure the size of a tower block. It once – supposedly – provided secretive missile defence and in Soviet times was marked as a children’s camp on maps. Here, in his gold cape, Valeriy plays his music and projects lasers onto this symbol of Cold War disinformation, whose actual purpose still varies depending on who is telling the story.

After the exhilarating event, Korshunov talks of his ambition for Chernobyl and Artefact. He has indeed reached out to the US festival Burning Man, on the basis that both it and the exclusion zone were based in deserts. And meanwhile Chernobyl will continue to grow as radioactive clickbait in the information war between west and east.