Last week I went to the DAU exhibition which I would describe as an immersion in the personal memories of USSR of an eccentric artist.

The process to enter the exhibition is in itself interesting because not only I needed to buy a ticket, but I also needed to answer couples of questions (around 20) in order to get my visa, which would give me access for a certain number of hours on a particular day. I bought my 24hours visa for Thursday at 3 pm, and it was specified that in order to get your visa it was essential to come 30 minutes before the time indicated on it. The information kiosk installed in the middle of the Place du Chatelet, for the exhibition, is full of old lamps, large desk, and in front of it, people talk to visitors to help them to find their way, and in front of the door, a security guy looks everywhere.

On Friday I came back, and I had a problem with my visa time, so I went to ask if I could change it a way or another. A young lady, who was whispering seemed puzzled and called her superior to see what they could do. In the end, they came back from the kiosk with my new shiny visa with the new time on it; the experience could start.

I went, on advice on the young lady to the Theatre du Chatelet. All the windows were covered in a blurry plastic obstructing the view and giving an effect of broken glass. At the entrance, two security guys were controlling everyone bag, ID and visa. AWhat I experience here, through the over control of my ID and visa, increases the feeling of entering a different world, where the rules are different, a closed world. Furthermore, in the USSR, it was particularly challenging to travel outside the Soviet Union. In the exhibition different type of visa offers different opportunities for travelling within the exhibition:

– type 1 gives you access to 6hours of the exhibition and no possibility to come back in if you go out

– type 2 offers 24hours access with the possibility of going out and in as many time as you like

– type 3 gave unlimited access for the all time of the exhibition. Having controlled opportunities to go out and in, being control by time, and having a different level of visa, definitely recreate an atmosphere of coercion were not everything is possible.

 

• Written a few days after I visited the exhibition

One other aspect that was really present was the importance of alcohol in daily life consumption:  how it created bounding but also the implications that came with it, like violence towards women. Hinote&Webber discuss that alcohol consumption was an important part of daily life, especially for creating bonds between workers. It was a gendered behaviour, which allowed men to construct masculinity (Hinote&Webber, 2012). They also argue that drinking became a major health issue for men in USSR because of the particularity of life under the soviet union: there were no aspirations, life was still, and men drank away their passions and will for another life. Furthermore, alcohol consumption enhanced physical violence towards women: if alcohol directly impacted the life expectancy of men it had an indirect impact on women’s lives throughout violence (Wasserman et al., 1998). This was really present in the footage, for example in a scene where a drunken man is hitting his wife, or a woman talking to a party leader/ hierarchical superior at work, about the behaviour of her husband that she accuses of violence, and she repeatedly expresses that it was due to his drinking habits.

 

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The communal flat had an impact on people’s sexual life. Svetlana Boym also discussed that her first childhood memory was the curtain in her room that separated her family from the others families in the communal flat (1994). In those conditions, privacy was only an illusion. In the footage, sexuality was central. A lot of scenes showed people having sex. One of the scenes represented a man with two women, alone in one of the communal flats after the other people went to bed; they are in the kitchen engaging in some flirting but all in ‘an open secrecy’ with everyone being able to perceive them. In the scene after that the man and one of the women are having sex quietly in the kitchen (from Ledeneva, 2011)

 

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The Soviet Union aimed to make women and men equal. One of the purposes of the communal apartment was to free women from domestic chores.  The organisation of the space with a big and communal kitchen intended to put women out of the kitchen (Boym, 1994). Furthermore, the communal flat offered a bridge between public and private life: it is a private home, in which many people live creating public interaction. Women, that are often associated with the private sphere, had an opportunity of participating in a form of public life (Attwood, 2010). Though it did not actually work: women had access to education but women were still in charge of negotiating the planning for access to the communal kitchen(Kiaer, Naiman 2006). This was visible in one of the scenes of the film where three women were cooking dinner, discussing what to put in the soup, while men were talking in the next room. 

 

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IK wanted to go even further in his reconstruction work: his first idea was to have the first exhibition in Berlin and to rebuild the Wall.  That wasn’t allowed -for now- by the City Hall of Berlin. If this is so understandable it is profoundly due to the particularity of sentiment around the Soviet Union. It seems easily understandable that building up the wall again might disturb people who lived during that time, because it had a particularly strong impact on their daily life, obstructing their future, closing their possibility to visit friends, creating a space outside the space. The sentiment of nostalgia of the USSR was discussed by many authors, with people, for example, expressing that they were missing the status, because it was part of their life and the feeling of « it was better before » was discussed in relation to schooling by O. Aydarova (2015). Can this project be described as willing to go back to this time? IK was fascinated with Ladau and this is why he wanted to built this project. Laura Piccolo describes that people after the fall of the USSR had a feeling similar to the ‘Ostalgia’ specific to Eastern Germany, that she calls ‘Back in the USSR’ which is literally applicable in the case of DAU (2015). This ‘memorabilia‘ is to her a new romanticism which explains the appearance of many films and books that mentioned life under the USSR after the 1990s (Piccolo, 2015). I believe that the DAU project falls into that category of art that is significant of this feeling of nostalgia for a lost past.

 

 

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A sensorial exhibition like DAU is part of an intellectual aesthetic started in the 1990s which call for multidisciplinary approaches and use of all senses in art but also academics with the born of phenomenology which encourages anthropologist and other researches to use their senses to comprehend the world(Lauwrens, 2012). In this exhibition, a comprehension of the Soviet Union is offered to the visitor through all its senses, then, the visitor can become an anthropologist understanding the particularism of the ‘society’ that lived in DAU town.  Furthermore, a part of the exhibition presented the characters in the form of wax statues and another was a reconstruction of a flat in the reconstructed Soviet town. The ethnographical department of the Russian Museum in Leningrad can in some way provide a good frame for the analysis of the DAU project. As Hirsch argues, the exhibition was part of the propaganda, promising to allow people from all over the soviet union to meet other citizens in their specificities and promised a virtual experience of the Soviet Union (2003). DAU is advertised on the website as a time capsule and the actors are described as people who accepted to abandon their life, and go live as if they were in the USSR. Therefore the exhibition can be interpreted as an ethnographical museum of this time capsule.

 

 

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The exhibition can be described in Jenni Lauwrens terms as a ‘feast for the senses’: there are things to see, to listen to, to touch, but most importantly to take part in.  The process of entering the exhibition in itself is quite oppressing: I had to go through two different control desks, one for my Visa and ID and one for my bag. Controls are now quite common in Paris so I was not disturbed by that. However, when I went out to take a break, one security guard asked me to show him my ID and visa again and I probably looked annoyed by it, because he felt the need to justify himself: « I’m really sorry miss, it is not my fault, it is part of the prerequisites for the exhibit, I mean, it is part of the act ». That confirmed what I was guessing: that the employees of the exhibition were not only there to ensure security and to welcome visitors, but were also part of the exhibition. What I experienced there, with the numerous checks of my ID and visa, increases the feeling of entering a different world, where the rules are different, a closed world and furthermore recalled the difficulty, in the USSR,  to travel outside the Soviet Union. Surveillance under the Soviet Union, especially the one of Stalin was an everyday life practice. As C. Hooper explains, surveillance was not something made especially by the police but something that was rooted in everyday life (in Kiaer, Naiman 2006).  In DAU exhibition, there were no real Police of the party but that feeling ongoing surveillance was still present I remember a camera in the toilets, one that was added for the exhibition which I know from experience but also thanks to the arrow pointing toward it, glued there to indicate the existence of the camera. The overall atmosphere of the exhibition gives a sentiment of entanglement in a parallel universe in which nothing truly makes sense and in which one is always on the frontier of violating an unknown rule. 

 

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In the exhibition, the aspect of the screening which was grey, massive, only bitumen stairs without proper seats could remind the visitor of the architectural atmosphere of the USSR which he or she would discover in the film and footages.

The footage of the town also allowed to have an impression of the architecture in ‘DAU town’. The town in itself was reconstructed on the Soviet architectural rules of massiveness and usefulness: the streets are large and the buildings are tall (Buchli, 1999). After the revolution, new buildings were constructed taking part in the ‘faire table rase’ of the past policy, creating the new material successful communist world (Hudson, 2015; Murawsky, 2018).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The presence of statues also reminds the visitor of the former Soviet Union. Stalin was attached to symbols and icons and enhanced the construction of statues of Lenin in each town, villages in the USSR (Kiaer, Naiman 2006). In ‘DAU town’, the statue does not represent Lenin as in USSR, but still recall this central material aspect of a Soviet Town.