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The imaginary boat of Chernobyl by Boudewijn Payens
Boudewijn Payens beside Bart Verschaffel explaining the map as to the location of Chernobyl at the Kids' Guernica conference held in Ghent 2011
Boudewijn Payens
As an artist from Amsterdam, he did a special artistic work with children in grave situations. The installation he brought about draws special attention to their situation by making something invisible visible through artistic work
Boudewijn Payens did this installation together with land artist Insa Winkler, who as Eco Artist and equally a member of Cultura21. Together they worked with children and local residents ten years after the nuclear accident in Chernobyl.
"The Children of Chernobyl" is a project the two created in 1996. The main focus is on the village Rowkowitschi in Belarus which has been contaminated like many other places in this region. This was due to the atomic cloud of Chernobyl which was artificially rained off above this area and this without any warning to the population. It happened on the first of May 1986, when everybody was celebrating that day out in the open. The theme and actual matter for children and adults growing up in such an environment is still relevant today. For Chernobyl stands for an environmental "Guernica of civil disaster" and underlines to what our modern world has become when dealing much more with invisible than visible dangers. Radioactive materials cannot be touched, smelled etc. but their contamination off-sets any rules of nature and severely damages the human health. It reminds as to what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Boudewijn Payens had the simple idea to take all the people, and in particular the children out to the icy playground and gather all the materials lying around, in order to construct an imaginary boat. Once that was completed, all went on an imaginary voyage. For something not physically possible, it can be achieved at least in the imagination, and this with the help of such an installation: a boat!
For information about Boudewin Payens see:
http://www.boudewijnpayens.nl/templates/artnature.pdf
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