The landscape around Chornobyl concealed more than one kind of secret. Pripyat and its power station were the visible face, a modern city demonstrating the promise of Soviet atomic progress. Behind the forest, absent from official maps and disguised as a children's summer camp, Chornobyl-2 was something else entirely. Avoiding its dominant feature, these images instead record the ordinary infrastructure of an enormous deception: corridors, staircases, sports halls and classrooms of a settlement that officially did not exist.

Chornobyl-2 housed the Duga-1, a colossal over-the-horizon antenna array reportedly twice as expensive to build as the nearby power station, designed to detect incoming nuclear missiles. Codenamed STEEL YARD by NATO intelligence, its repetitive radio interference earned it the nickname "Russian Woodpecker". Around 1,500 personnel were evacuated following the 1986 disaster, though the system continued transmitting until finally falling silent in December 1989. The antenna remains purposefully out of frame, present only as the unseen cause of everything visible.