IHer commitment to the “virus of violence”, which, according to her diagnosis, has attacked Russia, made the Petersburg Russian teacher and performance artist Darja Apachontschitsch the target of state harassment. At the end of last year, the new law that allows individuals to be declared “foreign agents” was applied to the petite mother of two, who gives free language lessons to women from immigrant families. This title, awarded by the Ministry of Justice, which Apachontschitsch wants to challenge, obliges them to document every quarter income and expenditure meticulously to the Ministry of Finance – with receipts for every grocery purchase – and to mark every Facebook post as a message from a “foreign agent”. Although she has received fees and support payments from foreign partners in the past, says the feminist, whom we can reach in the art, work and refuge that she founded “Evas Rippen” (Rjobry Ewy). But of course she is not a foreign agent, but if at all an agent of her compatriots, whose lives she is trying to improve. Shortly after the demonstrations against the arrest of the opposition politician Navalnyj, in which she had not participated, police officers stood in front of her door with a circular saw one early morning. They ransacked her apartment, interrogated her as witnesses in a trial against demonstrators, and confiscated computers and phones. The apartment owner then asked her to move out. Her situation is extremely uncomfortable, Apachontschtisch reports shortly afterwards from a place that she asks not to name, but she is surrounded by wonderful people who help her.
The state persecutes people who do its social work
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The activist, who grew up in Kamchatka as the daughter of a volcanologist, has made a name for herself through performances in public spaces. In 2013 she and friends founded the artist group “Rodina” (Heimat), which held the very depressive-sarcastic Petersburg “oh woe” parades, with performers holding cardboard signs with the words “Born born died” or “Pain Empty Patriotism” in front of them carried here. After Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014, Apachontschitsch and the artist Yekaterina Nenaschewa symbolically washed camouflage uniforms in red-colored water on Nevsky Prospect. Last summer she took part in the flash mob dance “Vulva Ballet”, which expressed solidarity with the feminist Yulia Tsvetkova in the Far Eastern Komsomolsk, who was accused of alleged pornography. The 27-year-old Zwetkowa, who advocates LGBT rights and overcoming gender role stereotypes with didactic comedies and drawings of imperfect female bodies, was given house arrest and fines. Apachontschitsch and other performers danced in front of the Mariinsky Theater with vulva emblems made of colored fabric, for which they chanted slogans such as “Pornography sits between your ears”. Police officers dragged Apachontschitsch into a patrol car.
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