Die Schwesternstraße / The Sisters Street: The Amazing Life of Tonfrau Ria N. is a 2025 documentary film about the Swiss national figure and trans icon Ria N., also known as Tonfrau Ria. Luciano Castelli appears in the film as a contemporary witness and fellow traveler in Berlin’s gender-fluid underground.
While not a painting, the film documents the cultural milieu that Castelli’s work emerged from and continues to engage with: the intersection of performance, self-presentation, and community solidarity that characterized West Berlin’s queer and punk scenes in the 1970s and 1980s. Castelli’s long-running series of androgynous self-portraits, begun in the 1970s, shares a formal logic with Ria N.’s performed identity: the body as mutable, theatrical, and socially constructed rather than biologically fixed.
See also
- Luciano Castelli — the artist
- The Pink Note — the queer register in Junge Wilden painting
- Salomé — fellow Junge Wilde with explicit gay subject matter