Rana Moussaoui (AFP)
Paris, France ●
Thu, June 30, 2022
For quite a few LGBT Russian artists, the invasion of Ukraine and the accompanying political crackdown was the last straw. Aided by a Paris charity, they have observed a new house in France.
Alexei, a 23-12 months-aged composer, made use of to consider that he could trip out President Vladimir Putin’s routine, but viewing his close friends currently being arrested or fleeing the region in the wake of the war, he felt he had been naive.
“The war caused me agony, shame and guilt — you convey to your self that you have not carried out sufficient towards this regime,” Alexei, who did not want to give his total name, informed AFP.
He realized he had produced the correct selection to go away when he read that law enforcement experienced frequented the St Petersburg audio university where by he was a teacher, accusing it of promoting “LGBT propaganda” over a photograph of Alexei kissing his boyfriend on its Fb website page.
He came to Paris with the help of a guidance group, the Company of Artists in Exile, and was joined by his boyfriend shortly following.
The company set up a hotline for artists from both equally Ukraine and Russia adhering to the invasion and has aided close to 100 artists from the two countries, furnishing them with studio space, as properly as enable with visas, language schooling and psychological help.
As he performs Rachmaninov — a Russian composer — in a single of the agency’s practice rooms, Alexei suggests he is relieved but daunted.
“In this article, I have some flexibility,” he reported. “I just do not know what to do with that flexibility.”
Ukrainians, Russians together
Other individuals have uncovered the changeover difficult, too.
Acquiring lived in consistent panic of currently being overwhelmed up back home, Angelu, a non-binary vogue designer, stated they were much too traumatised to leave their new apartment in Paris when they arrived.
It was, probably fittingly, a Ukrainian neighbour who approached them and served them get self-assurance to check out the metropolis.
That connection is mirrored all-around the agency’s workshops, the place Russians and Ukrainians do the job carefully together, and not long ago held a joint exhibition.
“The war stops at the doors of the workshop,” stated Judith Depaule, who co-founded the agency in 2016.
It is a weird blend, she reported, considering the fact that the Russians have misplaced all feeling of patriotism and the Ukrainians are in the midst of patriotic fervour.
Gena Marvin, 23, arrived in late April.
Again in Moscow, the transgender artist was doing the job on “trash art”, employing discarded things to produce costumes and sculptures, as very well as performances these kinds of as wrapping her body in tape that evoke “a region the place there is no flexibility and in which the flexibility of my physique was not permitted”.
Nonetheless stated as male on her official files, Marvin was terrified of remaining known as up to combat in Ukraine, and resolved to depart just after becoming arrested at an anti-war demonstration.
“I you should not experience the very same dread in France, but I am continue to on edge since the moment you’ve been accustomed to worry, you never totally drop it,” she mentioned.
She has thrown herself into her new lifetime. More than the weekend, she could be noticed wrapped in rainbow-coloured tape for the Satisfaction March in Paris.
Alexei, who is operating on the soundtrack for a film about Ukraine, continue to holds out hope of a person day becoming ready to go house.
“It is not Russia that is homophobic — only the Russian condition,” he stated.
