Luna Luna, like a dream, almost vanished from memory. In 1987, in Hamburg, the Austrian pop-star-turned-artist André Heller threw open the gates of a one-of-a-kind fairground. Inside, wandering circus acts performed in front of carousels and carnival rides designed by a crew of the greatest artists of their time. Some were already world famous, like Salvador Dalí, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein. Others were eccentric Europeans or the rising stars of the New York street art scene: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. That summer, 300,000 lucky visitors swarmed into the park, immersing themselves in colourful, radical, witty, sometimes scatological art. Then, like a circus leaving town, Luna Luna packed up and disappeared.
Heller had grand plans for his attractions to tour the world, but they never came to pass. Instead, Luna Luna ended up in storage, packed inside 44 hulking shipping containers somewhere in sun-bleached Texas. There it stayed for the next 35 years, forgotten by the art history books, with scarcely a mention online. Eventually, a few of those who remembered got word of its existence to Drake, whose entertainment company DreamCrew had the right combination of financial muscle (to the tune of $100m), live events experience and art nous to bring Luna Luna back to life. “Within a 30-second conversation of ‘this existed’, we were all in,” DreamCrew’s Anthony Gonzales told The New York Times about the moment he took the idea to the rapper. “‘How do we get involved?’”
