A Mind-Boggling Soviet Nostalgia Project
PARIS—It’s the most bananas artistic undertaking of this century. DAU, as the project is known, is a Soviet thought experiment that brings together A-list artists, world-class scientists, a handful of famous actors, Cambridge Analytica (almost), and a lot of Russian money to create 13 feature-length films, as well as an online experience and a rich auxiliary cultural program. The Guardian called it a “Stalinist Truman Show.” And so when DAU had its world premiere here in Paris last month after more than a decade in the works and years of ambient avant-garde buzz, I figured I had to go.
The DAU films are on view until February 17 inside two of Paris’s main public theaters, the Théâtre de la Ville and the Théâtre du Châtelet, which are open 24 hours a day for the event. If you show up as the pale winter sun is rising, you’re likely to bump into people just leaving after a night of carousing. The event features pop-up concerts (Robert del Naja from Massive Attack, Brian Eno), seminars (the writer Jonathan Littell, French academics), drinks (wine, vodka, Cognac, kvass), and food (borscht, gloppy Russian salads).
Some rooms in one theater are decorated like Soviet communal apartments, and visitors can hang out there, occasionally with members of the cast. Another theater has a room set up like a Berlin sex club. As part of the project, priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, and psychologists are on call to discuss people’s experiences of and to film their responses, which visitors can opt to archive or delete. Centre Pompidou, Paris’s preeminent modern-art museum, has also joined the bandwagon. Inside the Russian-art section is an enclosure furnished like a Soviet apartment, scientists live around the clock. Visitors can watch them read or pace around, like animals at the zoo.
