Some places feel heavy before you even know their history. The silence of a deserted street. The rusting shell of a factory. A forest clearing where nothing grows. Whether it’s the exclusion zone around Chernobyl’s “Red Forest” or the abandoned fishing towns near Fukushima, these spaces carry a weight that goes beyond what the eye can see.

When I travelled to Östersund while preparing Decay, I wasn’t only looking at maps and weather patterns. I was listening. The forests in Jämtland and across the Västernorrland border carry a silence that is never just absence. It is a silence full of weight, a silence that presses. People there know it. They have always known it. And when they lacked the language of radiation or soil instability, they gave that silence form in story. I found myself drawn to those stories.