In the name of “art,” activist and performance artist Mischa Badasyan plans to have sex with a different person every day for a year.
As soon as I saw this headline, I asked myself, “Oh, he plans on it? Can he guarantee that 365 different people will want to have sex with him every day?” But I suppose that’s beside the point.
The 26-year-old’s project, called “Save the Date,” hopes to challenge ideas of sexuality and homosexuality in the age of Tinder and Grindr.
His project, which he plans to begin in September, has been met with both criticism and praise, with some people saying “it’s not what you think!” and others saying “good luck.”
Badasyan asks loaded questions about today’s obsession with the hook-up culture, especially within the gay experience.
He recalls multiple experiences he had during his time in Glasglow where he’d meet up with random men and have sex with them in the park until 5 or 6 in the morning, feeling sad and lonely after the night was over.
With this project, Badaysan hopes to explore the connection between loneliness, hookups, and the idea of “non-places,” a phrase coined by French philosopher Marc Auge that Badaysan explains refers to:
[S]upermarkets, shopping malls, airports, motorways… [where] people lose their identity, there’s no communication, people don’t feel a belonging to somewhere and that causes the loneliness of people.
Badasyan wants to explore what happens when he has sex in these “non-places.” He plans on measuring his levels of loneliness, despite meeting and being intimate with a new person every day.
I don’t deny that it’s a bit egoistic. It’s OK. It’s performance art, and a performance artist should always be pushing his own body and the performance.
But it’s not stopping him:
The whole idea, why it’s art, why it’s a performance, is the process — the process of finding someone.
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