There’s this captivating scene in one of my favorite films, Nymphomaniac, by Lars von Trier, where the nymphomaniac protagonist loses her beloved father the only person she’s ever truly loved. She watches him on his deathbed, sitting up himself, vomiting, making a mess, growing delusional, screaming. In those final moments, she witnesses a completely different version of the man she once knew, once a handsome, free-spirited medical doctor, a clean, proper man, a caring father. As cancer ravages him, stripping away every trace of dignity, he dies horribly, drowned in a delusional hell, humiliated by what his body has become. And then, the scene ends, with an extreme close-up between her legs, as we see her cum slowly, slowly beginning to drip down her thigh. Beautiful.

Back in August, I did a photoshoot in one of my favorite places in Berlin, Treptower Park, at the Soviet War Memorial. I’ve felt a strong connection to that space ever since I first visited it in 2016. The memorial garden is vast, with a brutalist architectural style and a powerful aesthetic. Well-cut grass, serenity, and peace, cypress trees beautifully cared for, yet there are certain contradictions there. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it, but I also feel a deep attraction to the stark nature of communist brutalist aesthetics.

So I chose to do a shoot there, dressed in latex and leather, aiming to express seduction and desire for my viewers.
At first, I felt uneasy like maybe what I was doing was disrespectful to the memory of the millions of Soviet soldiers who lost their lives fighting the Nazi regime. But then other thoughts began to emerge, shaped by stuff I’ve read especially in my favorite body of work, queer theory. These texts are eye-opening and among the most thought-provoking I’ve ever read.

Today I opened my Fetlife and saw a comment that I found unsettling. A user commented under one of the photos, saying he knows very well where I took the pictures, and where I choose to shoot is disrespectful.
In a brief moment of panic, I deleted the comment and blocked the user.
Literally five minutes later, I regretted the impulse.
Not because it wasn’t “democratic” I’ve never claimed to be a democrat, I’m a proud authoritarian Tyrant, and blocking people is a kink of mine…
But because I realized I hadn’t looked at the situation through my favorite queer, upside-down lens and let ego-driven panic to take the reins.

Memorial gardens are curated spaces. They are designed for public mourning, but also for ritual, and artistic representation. Through aesthetics, architecture, landscape, and different sorts of materials memorials shape how tragic history is remembered.  And all of that is open to interpretation.

For centuries, cemeteries and memorial spaces have been settings for all kinds of expression: memento mori photography, doomed poets, romantic emos, sexy goth vampires making out upon the graves. Endless examples in art, music, fashion, and film industry.
Some people find these expressions deeply disrespectful because they challenge fixed ideas of how mourning is supposed to look. But mourning, like memory, is not a monolith.

The idea that the sexual cannot enter memorial spaces is a neoliberal model of mourning , one that is sanitized, and policed by a dominant narrative that allows only a singular interpretation of grief. In this narrative, memory becomes frozen, locked into one acceptable reading, determined by a specific group and imposed on everyone else.

When that happens, memory is no longer a living process, it becomes stagnant and untouchable. And in that frozen state, it loses the potential to be reinterpreted through other, equally valid human emotions, including desire itself.

Some theorists argue that trauma can never truly be healed only retranslated.
Trauma, by its very nature, resists closure. It refuses to settle sown to happy endings or the therapeutic solutions of dialogue. Instead, it lingers, lurking in shadows, manifesting through strange reactions, demanding to be felt again and again and again..

Many people avoid scratching at old wounds allowing trauma to sit unexamined, deep within their psyches. They carry on with their lives believing they have moved past it, only for trauma to become the real master of the house, silently shaping their choices, relationships, and very sense of self. Others seek healing, but healing, as psychoanalysis and trauma theory tell us, doesn’t occur in the way most hope.
No psychologist has ever truly cured trauma.
Trauma is like a parasitic entity fused within the mindbody. It is only through creative play and experimentation that this wound can be reorganized and then new pathways might emerge.

A queer approach to history does not aim to resolve trauma. Instead, it revisits trauma not to “fix” it, but to reimagine it, to open it up to new translations, new desires. Not closure, but mutation.

Latex as a material carries certain meanings like second skin, perversion, fashion, fetish, queerness, otherness,. Me wearing it in a memorial space is to insert a non-normative, queer /kinky body into a space designed for a particular kind of solemnity.

Isn’t queer memory about bodies like mine that were always there even when the records refused to preserve them?

Mourning is not always heterosexual, pure, or stripped of desire.

Sexual crimes committed during history’s greatest atrocities have been intentionally buried because they don’t fit the narrative of heroic suffering or collective imagination. As if victims don’t deserve mourning if they were sexually abused.

The same applies to race play, or uniform play in BDSM, which many find completely disrespectful to the history of a certain races, and  people they assume is practiced only by malicious racists sadists. But is that really so? Keeping the trauma of any group frozen leads only to stagnation, blocking thought for any new interpretations.

Playing with race, uniforms, age, or even religion may feel sickening and disrespectful on the surface, but it happens between two consenting people who enter dynamics and paint those experiences with their personal colors. How many thoughts and emotions can emerge after such a scene ends? Are those two people bad? And if so, bad to whom exactly?

Is libido, one of the strongest vital energies and forces, a shame to carry? Since it is so powerful, can it not open new horizons for people to reimagine themselves away from the narratives and histories often written by the usual suspects?

In this kink retranslation lies immense power for those who dare to play with taboos, new personal meanings and possibilities for relationship formation.
My intention in my work is not to be disrespectful. I use history but I do not refuse it.
I see mourning and desire not as opposites, but as complementary.
Sometimes mourning looks quiet. Sometimes it is loud and unconventional.
Sometimes it wears latex and it is a reminder that even if it’s not written in history books, it was always here.

With Love,

Mistress Aido Akida