Chicas e instituciones

There are hundreds, thousands, but they are almost invisible. We barely look at them, we never hear them. They work in cultural organizations of the Russian State: a particular world, almost gloomy, that imposes its murky laws on those who are part of it. Through the pages of this incisive and beautiful work by Daria Serenko, parade the "girls" who are in the lowest links of the cultural hierarchy. They are the women who prepare the exhibitions, try to balance the budgets, falsify the attendance statistics and pay the price when things go wrong. They suffer sexual and labor harassment, normalize their meager salaries and wonder what will happen to their future if one day they decide to be mothers. "Girls" who see their political freedom and expression diminished; who are waiting for a blackout to confess that they have been called to testify for having participated in a demonstration or for wanting to join a union or simply that they have divorced, because they suspect that a big brother with direct connection to the Kremlin is watching them at their posts worked; there are even those who exhale their last breath in a museum guard's chair.