Valentina Bianchi
NINA’S DRAG QUEEN SCHOOL

Description

“One is all the more authentic the more it resembles the idea she dreamed of herself.”
Agrado (Antonia San Juan) in All About My Mother by Pedro Almodóvar.

“I started photographing the Nina’s Drag Queen in November 2009 and I can’t stop anymore” recalls Valentina Bianchi, “the moment of preparation before the Show is incredible, difficult to explain in words. Difficult, and perhaps useless, to explain in words the metamorphosis that leads to the creation of a drag queen, a transformation that is first of all visual ”. This is why Bianchi immersed herself in the life of the school, focusing precisely on the intermediate stages of this transformation: make-up, dressing, rehearsals. However, the construction work of the drag queen character is not only aesthetic: the aim is in fact to find a new identity that does not deny the starting one, but rather becomes its most honest and faithful affirmation, as in the famous phrase of Almodóvar . The adepts seem to know well that the character they will have to play is actually already present, and any other trick or disguise will only be a means to make it visible; for this reason they are not afraid to show themselves in the preparation phase, they offer themselves proudly to the gaze of the camera.