“It’s something vulgar, but transvestite years are like dog years, they count for seven. I’m 27, but I already feel like an old woman,” says the Spanish Mina Serrano (Granada, 27 years old) with a laugh. She explains it from her apartment in Paris and with an accent in which the south of Spain, Buenos Aires, Paris and Italy coexist. Corners of the planet in which she has worked and lived and that sneak into the speech of this artist, with a hypnotic presence and impossible to pigeonhole into a single discipline. “I tell stories using the most appropriate medium. Sometimes it is audiovisual interpretation, other times performance, plastic art—from drawing to ceramics—or theater. “I am not moved by the format as much as by what I am communicating,” she explains. Her versatile resume ranges from performances in independent venues in European capitals to haute couture shows, and from starring on the covers of fashion magazines to playing the lead role in the series. Cris Miró (She)a biopic about the Argentine star who, without having been released yet, has already skyrocketed her popularity in Latin America.
Mina says that she had a lonely childhood. “I couldn’t find anyone in Granada who looked like what I wanted to be. I had no reference and I took refuge in the comics that my mother collected. Some I shouldn’t have read as a child, like Djinn, by the Spanish cartoonist Ana Miralles, with which she was obsessed,” she says, taking out a copy that she keeps in her Parisian home. “I was fascinated by these types of mysterious women. And since I was very introverted, I spent a lot of time alone, reading, watching movies and drawing. If I had been more popular with children, I probably wouldn’t have done any of that,” she says. She soon became interested in theater. “I accompanied a boyfriend I had to Madrid to take the RESAD entrance exams and I showed up too. In the end they caught me,” she remembers. She was 17 years old and in her head Marina Abramović flew over as the figure she would like to become. “I wanted to be naked, set fire… and she thought that in drama schools she would do that. I soon realized that this was not the case, that a school teaches you discipline and a work ethic. And that’s what I learned there.” But she also found a group of people who were looking to experiment and together they formed the company La Dalia Negra. “We made a postdramatic magazine with a certain taste for transformism, folklore and the experimental. We managed to have three performances a week in the off-stage rooms of the Madrid theater and we premiered a cabaret in Matadero.”
Shortly after, Mina jumped from the Madrid cabaret to the Berlin one. “Berlin is a magical and unexpected city, outside of convention. There I explored transgression and sexuality, because what she did was very explicit and very punk. At that moment I needed to express myself like this and put the patent leather boots on the table,” she explains. One day, she received an unexpected email. “It said that Riccardo Tisci, then creative director of Burberry, wanted to meet me. “I don’t know how they found me, but for me he was the iconic designer who had discovered Lea T, one of the first trans top models.” At that moment, Mina was orbiting the most alternative German scene and, once again, she jumped into another world that was waiting for her with open arms. “They sent me to London, to the firm’s headquarters. That seemed like The Devil Wears Prada and, as soon as I left, I received another email confirming that they made me exclusive for the firm. That is to say, they compensated me financially for not walking for anyone else. Suddenly I found myself at a party with Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Lea T herself,” she says. “I also started working with Marta Izquierdo’s dance company in France, and moved to Paris, where I explored other spaces outside of the night.” But not the cabaret, to which she has always remained linked while she has developed her career in dance and fashion. “Cabaret is halfway between contemporary art and the most theatrical dramatic part. I identify myself in that interval and I feel united to that universe by the non-blood inheritance of women who have preceded me and who have dedicated themselves to it.”
In his career, the performances which he has carried out in the French capital, in places such as the Musée des Archives Nationales, on the occasion of the 380th anniversary of the luxury fragrance and candle house Trudon, or at the Giacometti Foundation, with a tribute to the surrealist artist Sheila Legge. Also in Spain, in La Pedrera in Barcelona for the designer Paloma Wool or in the Teatro Clásico in Madrid. And the last one, at the Cannes Festival, where she performed last May with Les Moches. “It is an ephemeral cabaret, which we exhibit each time in a different and unconventional place, such as a circus, a dance hall or Silencio, David Lynch’s club.” He performs it together with Axel Ibot, dancer at the Paris Opera, and Carla Subovici, curator of contemporary art. “In it you can see people that you would never imagine together in a cabaret, like an opera singer, a prima ballerina, pole dancing professionals or a 70-year-old drag performer from Michou, the legendary cabaret in Paris,” he says.
During this time, he has also starred on covers in fashion magazines such as Another Magazinehas collaborated with artists like Arca and has made his film debut, in Roberta Torre’s film He favored, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. But it is with her interpretation of the Argentine star Cris Miró that she is achieving international fame without having yet seen the light of day. The series will premiere at the end of June in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile (on TNT and Flow); In the rest of Latin America it will arrive with Max in July and later it can also be seen in Spain. In Cris Miró (She) The life of the first trans star in the Argentine revue theater is narrated, an artist turned icon who broke barriers and died at the age of 33 in 1999. “The attraction of a musical revue has always been morbidity: from a bearded woman to Siamese twins. And the first star symbolized the summum of sensuality and beauty of women at that time and in that culture,” Serrano contextualizes. “That Cris occupied that position was extraordinary because she had her flat chest, a very unconventional femininity and more natural than the starling cis women who preceded her.”
Mina discovered the existence of Cris Miró by reading The evil ones, the novel by the writer Camila Sosa Villada. “I didn’t know who she was until a page announced the star’s death on television and gave a very poetic description of her. Something resonated so strongly inside me that I immediately closed the book and jumped on the computer to look up who it was,” she recalls. “It was very exciting, because at that time I was not so comfortable with my femininity, I tried to avoid myself, and when I saw it on the screen… —she takes a brief pause to find the perfect words—, when you grow up in a place where that you don’t identify with the women around you and you feel like an alien, something magnetic happens when you see someone and think that you could be like her and thus, perhaps, be happy. That’s why, since I saw her, Cris has always been there for me like a beacon. And from time to time I would come back to look for her.”
The material that is found about the Argentine on the internet, such as the interview that Mirtha Legrand did with her in the early nineties, in which she asked her questions such as what her real name was, if she shaved her own face or if it bothered her that It was known that he was a boy, evidence of the public trial that the iconic star had to endure. “They are terrible interviews in which she is asked horrible questions, of very low quality and with a lot of morbidity. But the essence of Cris transcends the format of the program. She possessed a mythological energy, as if she were a thousand years old, but at the same time she was tremendously close and loving.” When Mina describes her she creates an atmosphere similar to what Camila Sosa Villada achieves in her novel. “Trans people live in magical realism. The style in which it is written The evil ones It is something inherent to a generation before mine,” he says. “Older trans women have this way of speaking that is extremely poetic, vulgar and ironic at the same time, and it is beautiful. I would spend hours listening to them. The new generations have it more diluted, but I confess that I gravitate a lot to that magic.”
Cris Miró’s character also came to Mina by chance, although it was difficult for him to take the step. “I sent my material because some Argentine friends told me about the project and I knew they couldn’t find anyone. And the first time I suited up for the casting, my hair stood on end when I saw myself. “I noticed that something inexplicable was happening, but there were many things against it, like the fact that I didn’t have an Argentine accent or that I had never starred in a series.”
The Spanish artist has never had as much exposure as now. “Every day they talk about me and the series in Argentina. It is shocking. I hope that, with the situation that exists now in Argentina, it inspires, excites and gives optimism to people. In moments of crisis it is necessary to hold on to something that softens you and makes you feel. He biopic A star from the nineties can be many things, but this one has something genuine that people don’t expect, something that goes beyond its context. Marina Abramović, in her manifesto, says that the deeper an artist looks into himself, the more universal he becomes. Well, this happens with Cris.”
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