Somewhere

​Transporting the viewer into a world of post-atomic aftermaths, Charrière’s 2014 film Somewhere revolves around the Soviet nuclear test site, Semipalatinsk. In its meditative, trance-like style he embeds the somber mood of the test site, simultaneously referencing the cinematography of science-fiction films. The landscape is punctured by man-made scars, the remaining buildings from the test site, the forever reminders of the past. These objects are among the first unintended permanent monuments of the anthropocene––a post-human architecture of the bomb located in an environment too toxic for people to visit safely for longer than thirty minutes without protective gear. Like a broken sundial, the structures spiral outwards, arranged to gauge the intensity of nuclear explosions. The film shifts from eye-level views, soaring through the sky until it reaches the sun in a blaze of fire, everything consumed by an overwhelming white glow. What may have appeared as temples to scientific progress are now seen as merely rocks in the grass––the myth Icarus made concrete.