“In the heart of Paris, a sulphurous and chilling artistic installation bring the visitors into … The USSR.” wrote the newspaper L’Express, in the art critique column after the opening of the exhibition in Paris in February. On the DAU website, the exhibition is presented as the continuation of the experience started years ago when Ilya Khrzhanovsky decided to rebuilt the Soviet Scientific town in which Nobel Prize Lev Davidovitch Landau worked on matter, especially liquid helium. Around a hundred actors and more than ten thousand extras ‘left their everyday life to go back in time live in the Soviet Union (…) they fell in love, betrayed their friends (…)’ and were constantly filmed throughout their lives, in an artificial city that was completely modelled after the actual town of Kharkiv. This complete experience can recall a reality tv-show but on a longer time scale. The opening of the exhibition took place in Paris on January 25th 2018 and revealed the six films that came out of this first experiment. The exhibition consists in the presentation of the materiality of the ‘DAU town’, screenings of the films, and small booths that allow the visitor to have a look at the 700 hours footage of IK’s work.
I went to visit the exhibition on February the 15th. The process to enter the exhibition is in itself interesting because not only did I need to buy a ticket, I also had to answer a few questions (around 20) in order to get a visa, which would give me access to the exhibition for a certain number of hours on a particular day. Everything is made to make the visitor feels he or she is entering a different world, a parallel universe in which the imaginary of the Soviet Union is still operating. One example of this is the covering of all the windows of the Theatre du Châtelet in a huge blurry plastic tarp obstructing the view and conveying the effect of broken glass.
I want to understand how the DAU project says something about the USSR. I believe that it works as a Russian Doll with different levels of comprehension: the reconstruction of the town, the life of people in it that I have testified in the films and footages, and the exhibition itself. The aim of my project is to understand how much of it reflects the former USSR, but also what it means to construct a « reality show » of the USSR, and lastly the aim of the exhibition.
In the first page, I analyse the material culture of DAU, focusing on the architectural materialities, specifically on the display of a « communal apartment » and the aesthetic of buildings (both within the exhibition and in the town itself).
In the second page, I focus on the similarities between the life of the actors in the town and the one of people in the former Soviet Union, with a particular attention given to the specificity of life in a Soviet Scientific town.
In the last page, I discuss the meaning of such a project: I want to understand what it means to reconstruct a Soviet Town and what the exhibition stands for.