Andrea Goncharova was born in 2007 as an act of cross-dressing — an alter ego that allowed me to explore the boundaries of gender, representation, and desire. It wasn’t just a costume: it was a way of living another body, of embodying a different gaze, of putting narratives about masculinity and femininity under tension from within.
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Eleven years later, Andrea reappears to intervene one of the most powerful images in the Christian imaginary: the Virgin. In Virgin of the Free Bodies, the Marian figure —historical symbol of purity, obedience, and compulsory motherhood— wears the green scarf of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion in Argentina. The gesture is twofold: to inscribe the feminist demand into an icon that has sustained centuries of control over bodies, and, at the same time, to filter it through the signature of a character who was born as an act of identity subversion.
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The work operates as both appropriation and detour. Appropriation, because it draws from an inherited and widely recognized visual canon; detour, because it reprograms it with a contemporary sign of struggle. The green scarf not only updates the image: it dismantles it, rewrites it, and inscribes it into a historical moment where faith is no longer measured by obedience, but by the freedom to decide over one’s own body.

Andrea Goncharova is, therefore, a bridge between two moments: my performative cross-dressing in 2007 and my political intervention in 2018. Between them runs the same pulse: the will to disrupt narratives that attempt to fix gender, body, and desire into a single, obligatory form.