The visual testimony in Primavera em Tchernóbil, by Emmanuel Lepage

Abstract

In April 2008, a group of artists and political activists visited Chernobyl to document the lives of residents in the exclusion zones and the aftermath of the largest nuclear disaster in history, including the French cartoonist Emmanuel Lepage. However, despite their intention to record the horrors of the disaster, what they found was the lush nature of isolation and everyday life. How do you draw what cannot be seen, the invisible horror of radiation that looms over that seemingly ordinary and even beautiful reality? How can one represent the unrepresentable? While Lepage considers his work a comic report, this article seeks to frame Primavera em Tchernóbil as belonging to a literary tradition of testimony, as the work grapples with the testimonial aporia of the impossibility of representation and the urgency of witnessing. In this way, we believe the author creates a visual testimony by infusing the hesitations, urgency, and subjectivity of his experience in Chernobyl into the drawings and the comic narrative.