My project for this semester, guided by the brief: Exploring hybrid motions, rituals emerging from the extended digital body, explores the invisible legacy of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, considered the worst nuclear accident in history. I chose to investigate its impact on Italy—one of the countries affected by the radioactive cloud that crossed national borders—in order to anchor the research in a context I am personally connected to, and from which I can speak with critical and emotional agency.

My goal throughout the semester was to explore how embodied, sensory, and emotional responses might be used to confront systems of power that operate through invisibility. The resulting installation remembers the legacy of Chernobyl not as a closed historical event, but as a residue—ongoing, and deeply entangled with the infrastructures of capitalism and control. It invites participants to consider what persists in the aftermath, and how these traces continue to shape the world we live in, especially in a time when the threat of nuclear conflict is still very real.

Through a combination of ceramics, sound, and performance, the work reanimates the figure of the Baci di Perugina chocolate as a contaminated relic—an object of mass consumption reframed as a carrier of suppressed knowledge. Inside each wrapper, the traditional love notes have been replaced with fragments of state secrecy, radioactive data, and silenced testimonies. What once offered sweetness and romance now delivers exposure. Residuals turns these intimate gestures into acts of remembrance, resistance, and re-examination.