Pearls Before Swine

Abstract

This edited and abridged transcript of a long interview with Denis Shibanov, the architect of DAU, conducted by anthropologist of architecture Michał Murawski, expands on numerous themes pertinent to the DAU project and the context in which it was envisioned and created: the differing attitude to the Soviet past (and its material, affective and ideological legacies) as well as the post-Soviet present held by Shibanov and Khrzhanovskiy; the presence of allusions to the female anatomy in the set design of DAU, and their connection to the fraught approach to gender (and to gender politics) pervading the project; and the relationship between determinism and chance in the creative process and in historical development.

Keywords

• Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Kharkiv, Moscow, DAU set, architecture, space, ideology, New Man, New Person, constructivism, Stalinist architecture, Soviet everyday, postmodernism, determinism, gender