Drag-My-Vision is a videoclip competition by Salvia Arts, where drag artists from the Netherlands make videos from earlier songs from Eurovision Songfestival. They are invited to present their own version of the song. Miss Peukie and Maybe Boozegeoisie took this moment as a new chance to collaborate.
They represented Ukraine in this contest with a videoclip based on the song Lasha Tumbai from Verka Serduchka. Maybe: “It was a song I instantly fell in love with the first time I heard this! I had never watched Eurovision Songfestival, so happily Miss Peukie was the expert. She told me it created quite some buzz because of the ‘Mongolian language’ which translates ‘Lasha Tumbai’ as something like ‘milkshake’, but sounds like ‘Russia Goodbye’.”
This ambiguous play with message and meaning sparked the conversation about the Russian influence in Ukraine. Miss Peukie educated Maybe on this and they got to learn more about the situation and history of the country and its conflicts. Together they came up with a concept where they played with airtime: who gets the most influence, Russia or Ukraine?
This all happened in the beginning of 2022, before the war in Ukraine began. So when the war begun, they didn’t want to play on with the game of influence anymore. People were in danger. So what could you add to the existing perception? Does it need something nice and sweet? They edited the video material in such a way it became a video which displays the hypocrisy of Eurovision Songfestival calling itself an a-political event. The conflict in the video is now more about the fight between queerness and capitalism. Who’s got the most influence?
During the live show of Drag-My-Vision at Natlab, Eindhoven, the Dutch television show Hart van Nederland was present. Miss Peukie and Maybe took this as a chance to display some of their activism. Sadly the words of Miss Peukie were left out of the final video, but we enjoy her presence on the background! That must be quite radical on National Television.