consists of a series of large-format photographs and a five-screen video installation. It is a fantasy work about a ghost boy wandering around an abandoned city in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One day he encounters a red balloon that becomes his only companion in this quiet, sleeping place.
The project is inspired by documentary footage found in the archive of a former CCCP television channel. The footage shows a little boy chasing a football in Pripyat, a prominent town just two miles from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The footage was recorded in 1986, shortly before the Chernobyl explosion, which left the area around the plant, including Pripyat, completely uninhabitable. Pripyat remains as it was when it was evacuated more than two decades ago. Through her photographs of the city in its present-day condition, Vojáčková reveals a place that is frozen in time and history.
On visiting Chernobyl, Vojáčková, who was raised in communist Czechoslovakia, came across the remnants of the lives of the town’s inhabitants: furniture, fabrics, toys, communistic propaganda on school noticeboards. These remnants struck a chord with the artist, as she recognized them as familiar items from her own childhood.
RED BALLOON 86 relates to the original documentary footage of the child chasing the football, while also referencing Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic short film, The Red Balloon, in which a little boy follows a helium-filled balloon. Lamorisse’s film was shot in the Belleville area of Paris (an area which was subsequently destroyed, and remained untouched, like Pripyat, for another two decades.) The wandering boy with a balloon is therefore designed to reconcile a West European audience with an East European motif, and vice versa.
Strong colours, and carefully staged and manipulated imagery, make the photos and videos reminiscent of scenes from children’s books; at the same time the images maintain a documentary feel to them. As such RED BALLOON 86 explores the link between childhood fantasy and reality of adults.