DAU. Degeneratsia

The DAU Institute in Kharkiv was an experiment designed by director Ilya Khrzhanovsky in which leading mathematicians, artists, philosophers and mystics lived and worked between 2009 and 2011. Among other things, they explored the foundations and limits of intellectual understanding and human action, working towards the creation of a “new human being” and beyond, to the bloody end.

“DAU. Degeneratsia” shows the secret institute as a place where scientific and occult experiments are conducted on animals and people and the properties of ideal human images are negotiated. Marina Abramović, Romeo Castellucci und Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz are among the participants. The secret service chooses to turn a blind eye to the erotic excesses, the nightly debaucheries and the scientists’ cruel and strange experimental methods, until finally, a group of radical youths disguised as new test subjects is infiltrated into the institute. The institutes’ new management commissions them to put a stop to the activities of the scientists and researchers.

So far, 14 feature films and several film series have emerged from the DAU project. In the summer of 2018, Berliner Festspiele were preparing to host a presentation of “DAU” as an urban project with a large-scale, enclosed event area in Berlin-Mitte Unter den Linden. It had to be cancelled shortly before the starting date because of supposedly still open safety-related questions.