By a miracle, the girls managed to escape, and eventually, Mokov was arrested. His sentence was only seventeen years in prison. That was justified by the fact that he did not kill the girls, but only raped them…Now, the Skopin Maniac is out in the world and recently there was a whole feature about him on Russian TV. And you know the Russian TV is cynical as hell! They treated him like a star, inviting him to talk shows and interviewing him, and the interviewer was sort of flirting with him. All the people who are into any kind of human rights discourse were really shocked to see how welcomed he was. For me, it was extremely hard to see how celebrated he got. It was hard enough to trigger me to work on this project and bring into my work a subject that I have never really dealt with before, which is sexuality.

AG:  Right!  On this note, if we look at the works I selected for our conversation, you will see that I was most interested in drawings that are made from the women’s point of view. These works describe the women’s role in the industry, but also a shared sense of community and solidarity, that goes beyond whether they voluntarily or involuntarily found themselves in the sex working field. I am interested in these scenes of shared life, also because you mentioned that you used to disavow art as therapy. I would love to hear the narrative scenarios that are in these images. Let’s start with the drawing Washing It Off.

ZC: I looked at several videos of sex workers in Russia to make this body of work. In these videos, what immediately arises is that this job is still considered to be a crime in Russia. This allows the police to ambush brothels very often and then arrest everybody, which is a scene that they usually also film. But you know, the penalty that they charge is just money, and to be fair, the reason why they do this is just to get money from the sex workers.

In these videos, all kinds of weird stuff happen. For example, there are some scenes where the police film the girls while shaming them. Many of these videos are on YouTube now, accessible to everyone. I look at the scenes in these brothels and depict my own version of them. Very often, there are moments that take place in very typical post-soviet apartments, places that are familiar to me. When they can, the girls in the videos usually cover their heads with a towel, because they do not want to be filmed, or they look away and stay hidden.

ZC: Maybe! Or maybe she is drinking because she is done for the day. It could be both to me.

AG: Obviously there are a lot of tropes here dealing with the emotional burdens of this type of labor. There is simultaneously a sense of solidarity and lightness. In the drawing of the women laying in bed watching television, you can just feel the camaraderie amongst these women. It is interesting also because this depicts the women within a duality. There is a possibility that they are objectified for male consumption. Yet these women are in their own private world, relaxing among themselves, yet they still wear all the garb and accouterments of their day jobs.

ZC: You know, this is funny because in the picture you are pointing out the characters are watching the movie I just mentioned to you: Intergirl. You can see it on the screen! What you said is true. In many of these drawings, I depict domestic settings. I imagine these women at work, in moments where they don’t have a client around and they are just spending time together. You know, even if I personally don’t hang out with my girlfriends dressed in this way, I can see myself in this image. I showed this drawing to a friend that I usually meet up with to go watch TV at another’s friend house. She looked at the image and said: “Oh, this is Friday evening at Diana’s!”.

AG: This leads me to another drawing that I like, where a group of women are doing their nails. This is such a universal experience of girls bonding! A classic trope of women coming of age together, doing each other's makeup or nails. But here these women are semi-naked. In this image, there is once again the push and the pull of the universal male fantasy. It adds another layer of fantasy, which is not just the one around the sex act that the male client pays for, but also this idea about a house, a brothel, that is full of semi-dressed women that spend time together, don’t you think?

ZC:  Definitely! I took this idea from one of the videos. These are real scenes and in this one house, there was a kitchen that looked just like mine. And these women, they are there, making tea and it looks like a very domestic situation between the girlfriends, but they are all dressed in sexualized clothing.  And on top of it, they all look like the girl next door! They are not modeling, you know? They are normal people. 

AG:  And in a similar way to Lautrec, there is a certain implicit romanticization or fetishization of the sex worker, is that right? 

ZC:  For sure. And some of these sex workers are also funny. Take the drawings I made where they are singing in the sauna karaoke, for instance. These scenes are important to me because they present diverse types of perceptions. In one of these drawings, a woman is singing “American boy I will ride away with you.” There was a time when Soviet girls were dreaming of running abroad with a man from America. Many of them got engaged in sex trafficking because of this romantic dream.  

AG: I think the fact that you try to use a certain amount of objectivity in presenting these different vignettes and scenes is by default a sex-positive, feminist point of view. I mean you are not denouncing sex work; you are presenting it. This makes me think about an organization in the US, which I believe became international. It was called Coyote: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics. Margo St James started it as an association of sex workers and lawyers who supported feminists and the right to engage in sex work. It validated sex as a job, as a form of labor like any other. And in a way, I see your approach here being more in that vein. Your subjects are just “Women Who Work.”

ZC: Although this perception comes across, I ultimately drift away from having an opinion on this topic because you know, I am not immersed in this discourse enough to feel confident with taking sides.

ZC:  This woman is in front of the hotel called Intourist. It is the hotel where you meet clients from abroad that will pay in dollars. There is one in all the big cities. 

AG:  And there is this other image with a man, where we see a suggestion of direct violence and danger. I like this image a lot and I thought it was important to highlight it. The women are here together, on the couch, but they are not the main subjects, they are an audience. At the same time, they are also having this collective moment that is very different from the one they are having in the previous image, where they are sitting on a couch. Here, they are sharing a sense of fear.

ZC:  This is an image that I drew from the police raids that I watched in the videos we talked about. This is indeed a very violent scene. The men always end up on the ground. And the women, they are usually scared and hiding. 

AG:  It's interesting. It sounds like most of your inspiration for the series is rooted in YouTube videos. 

ZC:  It is not only YouTube videos. I reference a lot of post-Soviet movies about organized crime. In these movies, there are always episodes of sex trafficking, even if the movie itself is not about it.