Explore the Soviet city designed to heal the pain of Chernobyl with these new art residencies

A new residency project is searching for artists to explore the utopian city designed to rehouse workers from the contaminated ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Each district in the city of Slavutych, northern Ukraine, was created by a different team of pioneering architects from across the Soviet Union. Each neighbourhood now bears the name of the city which was responsible for rebuilding the area in the healing spirit of Soviet brotherhood.

The ten teams built a town for 25,000 people in less than 18 months, each bringing unique elements of national architecture and design — from Azeri patterns on the buildings of the Baku district, to Armenian pink stone cladding in the Yerevan neighbourhood.

The 86 Festival of Film and Urbanism is now inviting artists, architects and urbanists to explore the city as part of a month-long residency program. The team is searching for 14 participants, who should be familiar with one of the cities which worked on the original project: Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Kiev, St Petersburg, Moscow and Belgorod.

Artists from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Greece are also invited to apply in order to explore some of the city’s later neighbourhoods — from the Pechersky, Dobryninsky and Chernihivsky districts of the 1990s, to the Athens neighbourhood built in 2014.

Participants will be asked to reflect on the city’s unique urban history and on the future of each neighbourhood in an era of uncertainity and changing identities.

The work will be curated by the METASITU art collective and featured at this year’s 86 Festival of Film and Urbanism between 9 May and 13 May 2018.

Deadline for submissions is 7 March 2018. For more information, or to submit your portfolio, click here.