The Radiant Screen

The Radiant Screen is a project about the closed city of Zheleznogorsk, hidden in the heart of Siberia. Zheleznogorsk is one of the twelve (still-)closed cities in Russia. It was established in the early 1950s to serve as a top-secret site for military scientific research, designed as a utopian city according to an artistic masterplan. As a secret city, Zheleznogorsk did not officially exist or appear on any maps. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its residents voted on whether to maintain their distance from the rest of the world and stay “closed”. They chose to remain in splendid isolation. The Radiant Screen is a mesh of evidence for which Lamers collaborated with various people, each participant reflecting different aspects of the dream. Lamers gathered evidence, verbal descriptions, testimonies, and archival documents. Combined with her own photographs and produced recordings, this publication present a layered story of “the last socialist paradise on earth”, full of controversy with gaps and glitches.