Babochka

Between 2015 and 2017, Laurie Griffiths and Jonty Tacon, made regular visits to a remote and largely unknown Lithuanian town called Visaginas. Set near the border of Latvia and Belarus, Visaginas is an ex-Soviet town that is defined by its sole purpose – to house the workers and builders of what was once the world’s most powerful nuclear power station. At its peak, the Ignalina twin-reactor plant had ambitions to be joined by a third, fourth, fifth and sixth reactor – ambitions that would have secured a lucrative future for the people of Visaginas. However, the idea of an ex-Soviet nuclear power plant in the heart of Europe that shared the same RBMK reactor technology as the ill-fated Chernobyl, proved a step too far for Brussels, and its closure became a central condition of Lithuania’s acceptance into the Union.

The impact on the less than 40 year old town of Visaginas, that has gone from being an example of a Soviet utopian dream to a town with an uncertain future, became the subject of Laurie and Jonty’s photographic study and now their documentary Decommissioning a Dream set for a September 2o24 release. As they immersed themselves into the closed community of largely Russian-speaking Lithuanians that still live in the town and with unprecedented access to the deeply-guarded inner sanctum of the power station itself, a picture of pride, survival, community and a fractured identity emerged. 

Babochka (Butterfly) is the collection of images, films and academic essays that embodies their experience. A mixture of the everyday and the monumental, their joint project seamlessly takes the reader on a journey that begins at the very core of the power station itself, through the town, its people and a suggestion of what is to come. This is a story of purpose and place and challenges the very notion of what it means to be European.