by Chad Gracia
Fedor Alexandrovich was a young boy when the toxic effects of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl forced him to leave his hometown. The Ukraine-based artist is now 33 years old and has radioactive strontium in his bones. What was the cause of this catastrophic accident? What is behind the concealment of the Chernobyl files? And what on earth does all of this have to do with the huge steel pyramid known as the ‘The Russian Woodpecker’, which towers into the sky 2 km from the scene of the accident, right in the middle of the contaminated area? Obsessed with these questions, Fedor travels into the exclusion zone in search of answers. While his country is gripped by the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, he decides to make his findings public in the middle of Maidan Square and place himself in the line of fire of the Russian secret service.