Stalker

Strange conjunctions in the wreckage: a sewing machine, a hatstand and a record player; a high board poised over an empty swimming pool. Walter Benjamin: 'Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.' A ruin always tells some story about impermanence and decay, but Pripyat is also where Soviet futurism came to die. Its modernity is our antiquity: the unachieved future of the perfect worker citizen coexists with the ghost of a greater disaster, the virtual future in which the containment efforts were unsuccessful, and a huge area of Europe was rendered uninhabitable for thousands of years.

Hari Kunzru

4:01 p.m. - 2014-05-03