DAU: the art of making money with exploitation and human suffering
I saw, in my Facebook contacts, several dithyrambic posts about “DAU”, a gigantic project of film and art installation, halfway between reality TV, immersive theatre and totalitarian experience. DAU is the project of a director named Khrzhanovsky, who seems to have unlimited power and means at his disposal. He created a set of filming in Ukraine, reproducing a city, full of hidden cameras, and in which, 400 people lived for three years more or less in immersion and in an imitation of a totalitarian system. Immersive Dictatorship for customers spectators… The cinematic images produced will be broadcasted in Paris, as part of a kind of immersive show, at the “Théâtre de la Ville” in Châtelet. To view them, one has to fill out a Visa application that asks highly personal questions (by allowing the use of our personal data without any restrictions to DAU), to pay an expensive price, and to commit to staying between 6 to 24 hours inside the facility. Initially, I was obviously intrigued by this project that seems to be out of the ordinary, but several things in the (very positive) articles, shared by my contacts, quickly made me feel uncomfortable. In several of these articles, it was mentioned in passing, as if it was only a detail, of unpaid work, authoritarianism of the director, crises of madness or violence, unsimulated and filmed… This alarmed me and added to the mistrust I already had about the idea of privileged people in France paying to give themselves…
