JEF BONIFACINO

France

website

Belarus' Legacy

Biographie

Jef Bonifacino is a freelance photographer who develops long-term documentary projects focusing on social or environmental themes. He establishes links between different spaces in order to question the relationship between man and his environment and history. In 2019 he is a founding member of Inland, a cooperative of twelve documentary photographers.

Présentation

“In 1986, Tchernobyl’s nuclear power station exploded. The first radioactive fallout impacts mostly
Byelorussia.
The exclusion area of Chernobyl, 30km around the nuclear power, is created straddling Ukraine and Belarus.While the exclusion zone still contaminated and the bielorussian’s population is the most affected by nuclear’sdesastre, the new Bielorussian’s nuclear power station of Astravots was launched in 2020. History repeatsitself in silence. Oleg lives in Kamarin, 30km from the Chernobyl power plant. He told me with a smile: "That way they might succeed in killing the second part of the population."
This cycle of repetitions due to the occultation of the past defines Belarus in particular. As Tatiana Gloukhova wrotes: “Memory is constitutive of identity… It is precisely discontinuity, intermittence that best characterizes Belarusian collective memory. "
The current Belarusian population is 10 million; in a century nearly 5 million people have been killed by wars and revolutions. Some of the inhabitants are sick: Belarusians are still the
first victims of Chernobyl. This Belarusian heritage is hidden, often on purpose. For President Lukashenko, in office for 26 years, it is easier to prevent his people from talking about the past and learning from it. For the population, it is sometimes too painful to remember the traumas.
This documentary work explores several important sites of memory across the country. By making different eras respond to each other, my work questions the repetitions induced by forgetting, and tries to recreate a dialogue between two silences. Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl disaster, this series examines traces of the country's history to shed light on its present.