Let Them Believe

Eva and Franco Mattes with Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark

Let Them Believe

2010, 15’17”

31 March – 13 April

“The idea came after meeting sculptor James Acord, the only individual licensed to work with radioactive materials. He thinks that it’s inevitable that artists use the materials of their age. I was ten when Chernobyl’s radioactive cloud flew over my head, and into my thyroid” Eva Mattes.

On 26 April 1986 there was a catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe, and resulted in the creation of a 30km radius exclusion zone – the ‘zone of alienation’ – around the reactor. Today, the zone of alienation is largely uninhabited, except for about 300 residents who have refused to leave. The area has largely reverted to forest, and has been overrun by wildlife. The radiation levels remain so high that the workers responsible for ensuring the safety of the ruined reactor are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest. Ukrainian officials estimate the area will not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years.

The accident is one of only two – the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 – classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) by the International Atomic Energy Association.

In the Summer 2010, inspired by Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, Eva and Franco Mattes, along with collaborators Ryan C. Doyle, Todd Chandler, Tod Seelie, Jeff Stark and Steve Valdez, embarked on a journey to Chernobyl, to develop a secretive Plan C. After obtaining permissions to enter the highly radioactive zone of alienation they ventured into the ghost town of Pripyat and found an abandoned amusement park. Built for May Day 1986 as a gift to the power plant workers from the grateful Soviet authorities, the amusement park was never officially opened, the reactor exploded five days before. Finally, the group found what they were looking for: the Red Ride. The group picked through the irradiated remains. A load of scavenged materials left the Zone on a dilapidated tractor, leading west. A month later the scrap metal was sitting in an anonymous warehouse in a railway arch in Manchester, UK, where the group started secretly working day and night on The Liquidator – a replica of the Red Ride. The sinister-looking sculpture-ride was installed overnight in Manchester’s Whitworth Park. The ride operated daily for a week at the beginning of October, with thousands of enthusiastic visitors of all ages and origins enjoying . It than disappeared as fast as it had appeared.

Let Them Believe is a short film by Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark, in collaboration with Eva and Franco, documenting Plan C.

“Thousands of tons of radioactive scrap metal leave the Zone everyday to be sold to the Russian and Chinese market and eventually come back to us in the form of spoons, pots and sinks. Radioactivity has no border. So we must probably just get used to it, starting from the younger generations” Franco Mattes.

“The whole 30 km Zone is highly contaminated, but eventually everything will go back to normality, it’s just a matter of time, it’ll take about 55 thousand years.” Eva and Franco Mattes