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The very long and thin body wrapped in white gauze can barely be seen against the gray sea of Magadan, a small village founded in 1929 and which became a sorting center for Stalin’s prisoners headed to the Kolyma labor camps. All attention is focused on the delicate, deep eyes that pierce the hairless, porcelain-white face of the Siberian queer artist Gena Marvin. She is a tearless pierrot, but no less sad. She moves slowly, her arms as if pulled by an imaginary wind, while she stands biblically on plexiglass stilettos pointed at the ice that covers the ground of her home village. At her supermarket they throw her out accusing her of upsetting old people and children.
We then see her descending the stairs of the Moscow subway with a superb exoskeleton that swells into large ovaries on her hips, and on her head the solemn and disproportionate horns of a white stag beetle. And then walking through the streets of Moscow, anchored in dizzying heels, alongside the brave people protesting against the war, silent and ephebic, all wrapped up in barbed wire. And, again, dressed in duct tape, wrapped around her entire body, which has the colors of the Russian flag. They arrest her, she is expelled from school.
Thin, very black, she can be seen arching towards the gray sky and bowing to the earth, whose depressions are dark mirrors of rainwater, with her fingers become branches and long antennas pointing towards the celestial vault. And then look for herself in the mud. Suggestive, poignant, hers is an abstract, radical aesthetic and political claim. Without ever saying a word she claims to exist, she asks to be looked at.
Director Agniia Galdanova portrayed her struggle and question in the moving documentary Queendom, presented at the Festival du film et forum international sur les droits humains in Geneva (Fifdh). A film that knows how to maintain and contextualize the explosive subversive charge of the twenty-one-year-old artist capable of creating a purely emotional narrative around his body that instills in those who watch it the necessity of his right to exist and be himself and the horror of totalitarianism, from which she was forced to flee, which is expressed in current affairs with the visceral rejection of Putin’s repression towards LGBTQ+ people and towards any form of peaceful dissidence.