The exhibition, the result of the work of Peruvian artist Sonia Cunliffe and Cuban journalist Maribel Acosta, delves into the health program that Cuba developed for 21 consecutive years, assisting thousands of minors affected by radiation.
On April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of the Vladimir Ílitx Lenin nuclear power plant exploded, causing the largest nuclear accident in history. The radioactive cloud reached much of Europe, leaving thousands suffering from cancer and skin conditions that persist to this day.
The research for the exhibition began in 2011, when Sonia Cunliffe visited the Tarará spa, east of Havana, and observed the children bathing on the beach. Later, in 2015, the meeting with Maribel Acosta led to a joint research project that included contacts with doctors, patients, and the review of Cuban newspaper archives.
This effort allowed for the reconstruction of a little-known part of history that began on March 29, 1990, when the first flight from the former USSR arrived in Cuba with the first of 26,000 children from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova who received free medical assistance until 2011.
“"The exhibition 'Lost Documents: Chernobyl Children in Cuba' constitutes an ordered investigation of the context and its actors, from the recovery and reconstruction of textual, photographic, sound, audiovisual documents, and objects and equipment; anchored in the concepts of memory and oblivion, as a present social imaginary. It makes us feel the responsibility of the human act."
For her part, Sonia Cunliffe exhibits a work based on the art of archiving, deconstruction, and reconstruction of narrative layers. Photographs become testimonies, gestures of rootedness, explaining a name, a time, and a longing, whispering tears and smiles.
As a central element of the exhibition, sound is present. The young Cuban composer Jorge Antonio Fernández Acosta composed Liusia's Lament, a piece inspired by the testimony of the dying firefighter's wife, collected by Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, in her book Voices from Chernobyl.
