Art performer, poet, software programmer – the faces of protest
MOSCOW — One of the key ideas behind the Russian punk provocateur band pussy Riot was the supremacy of an idea over personality — thus the balaclavas that made the members both unrecognizable and fearsome.
But the three members who were jailed in March following a guerrilla performance denouncing President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral have unwillingly emerged as vivid — and very different — characters. They await a verdict Friday on charges of hooliganism.
One is a daring performance artist with Angelina Jolie lips and a notorious part in a filmed orgy just days before she gave birth. Another is a poet and environmentalist whose pre-Raphaelite looks project sweetness and sensitivity. Rounding out the trio is a quietly cerebral computer expert, who has applied her skills both to nuclear submarines and experimental art.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich came together several years ago in a confrontational art group called Voina (War), which attracted notice with risqué stunts. The group painted a 65-metre penis on a St. Petersburg drawbridge — visible in much of the city when the bridge rose — and in 2008 staged an orgy in a Moscow museum as a mocking commentary on Dmitry Medvedev’s imminent election as Russian president.
Voina’s chief ideologist, Alexei Plutser-Sarno, told the Associated Press that the three “performed courageously” with the art group.
Tolokonnikova, 22, who was heavily pregnant when she appeared in the museum orgy, has become the main face of Pussy Riot.
“Since childhood I’ve loved finding myself in extreme situations. I’ve always lacked unusual things in my life,” she said in an interview with Plutser-Sarno published in his blog. In her final statement at the trial last week she said that Pussy Riot provided her a long-sought creative outlet.
“We were looking for genuine sincerity and beauty and found it in our punk performances,” she said.
Alyokhina, an accom- plished poet with long curly blond hair, is quite a different face of Pussy Riot. Alyokhina, mother of a 5-year-old boy, has a long background in charity work and environmental activism.
She organized protest pickets to defend Utrish, a natural reserve in Russia’s south, from developers and worked with Danilovtsy, a Russian Orthodox charity.
Samutsevich, 30, studied computers at Moscow Energy University and soon got a good job at a top research centre. She was promptly hired to a job in a top secret depart- ment where she was designing software programs for Russia’s top nuclear submarine Nerpa, her father, Stanislav, said.
Samutsevich later quit and enrolled at the renowned Rodchenko Photography and Multimedia School to study media art. Her final project at the school was designing a web browser that intentionally distorted and manipulated search results, an invention that was supposed to highlight society’s dependence on media and helplessness in the uncharted waters of web media.