Giorgia De Santi on Drag, Performance, and Gender Fluidity at Viafarini

In an interview with Artribune, artist Giorgia De Santi discusses her performance "(How) Can a Woman Be a Drag (Queen)?" presented at Viafarini in Milan in 2017. The piece explores perpetual transition, gender ambiguity, and the decontextualization of drag within an art space. De Santi describes a cacophonous shared space with two other performers, where she applied makeup to achieve a neither male nor female appearance, wrote questions on the wall, and later used an angle grinder in an aggressive, masturbatory gesture. The work builds on her 2016 performance at the Venice International Performance Art Week's Fringe section, where she also used an angle grinder and addressed binary gender critique through a plant with two flowers. De Santi, who studied Visual Arts at IUAV and the Centro Teatrale di Ricerca in Venice, cites influences from queer studies, trash iconography, theater (Silvia Calderoni, Motus), and artists like La Pocha Nostra, Francis Alÿs, Heather Cassils, Bruce LaBruce, and Matthew Barney. She emphasizes that drag in Italy is often narrowly seen as men dressing as women, while she advocates for broader identities including women, queer, gender-fluid, and non-binary individuals. The interview was conducted by Gabriele Longega and Ilaria Zanella.