We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations,
recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the
explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear
power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and
experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey
region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the
generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and
images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative
grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable
as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize
it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps,
cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.
“Welcome these blossoming photograms exposed to the flashbulb of
intertwingled planetary mutation. Tune in and turn on with these
crackling plant transductions of Chernobyl’s ongoing signal, verbed and
reverbed with Marder’s exhalations of word. Behold Tondeur’s exalted
haptic photosynthesis! Adore the nimbus of radioactive bioluminescence
that avoids your avoidance! Let there be plant light.”
Rich Doyle, Penn State University – author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere.