Directed by artist Nicol Vizoli, the video for composer Galya Bisengalieva's “Chagan” reflects on the haunting nature of a radioactive lake in Kazakhstan
“It’s this incredibly big thing that happened in Kazakhstan where we’re still reluctant to talk about it and we’re just starting to understand the impact that it’s having,” composer Galya Bisengalieva tells Abi Bliss in The Wire 478, descirbing a period between 1949–89, when the Soviet government carried out 456 nuclear tests in countryside near the northeastern town of Semipalatinsk. Bisengalieva's second album Polygon explores this part of her country's history, and questions why the large-scale radiation sickness caused by these tests is still relatively unknown in the west.
This track, “Chagan”, accompanied by a film by Nicol Vizioli, is named after a lake in Kazakhstan. Artist Vizioli explains that the lake “was created after a nuclear test conducted in 1965 by the Soviet Union’s Nuclear Explosion Program. On that occasion the blast generated a massive crater, which was then filled with water, giving birth to Lake Chagan, often referred to as the ‘Atomic Lake’.”
Vizioli says her video aims to offer “a glimpse, the suggestion of a feeling of the world that I could only imagine: polluted, slow, contemplative, still after a great calamity”, evoking the atmosphere of the highly radioactive lake with elements within her reach. The film also includes an appearance by performer Yen-Ching Lin, about which Vizioli says, “I felt that it was important to include the human element, as a way to remember what it once was, or to represent merging with the toxic environment and becoming radioactive itself.”
Read Abi Bliss's interview with Galya Bisengalieva in full in The Wire 478. Wire subscribers can also read the article via the online library. Polygon in released by One Little Independent.
