Feeling lonely and unfulfilled? Perhaps having sex with a different person every day for a year will help. Or perhaps it will simply make you an anonymous non-space. That’s the intention of performance artist Misha Badasyan. As part of his “Save the Date” project, every day for 365 days beginning in September Badasyan will engage in anonymous hook-ups with strangers (all men) in anonymous spaces (airports, shopping centres, supermarkets). The anonymous public spaces are “non-places” according to Badasyan, taking his cue from French philosopher Marc Auge. “He was writing about non-places in the big cities; places like supermarkets, shopping malls, airports, motorways, and he says that people lose their identity, there’s no communication, people don’t feel a belonging to somewhere and that causes the loneliness of people,” said Badasyan. “Save the Date” will extrapolate this cold, often corporate sense of loneliness into his sex life, exploring non-places in reality, in interpersonal relationships and on the Internet, the ultimate non-place. “Eventually I’ll be like a non-place.”
Badasyan has signed up on internet sex sites, has been tested for STDs, and has even found a condom sponsor. He is hoping that each of the men he meets will give him a small souvenir of their encounter, acquiring 365 objects to help make “all of the non-places into one place.” He isn’t planning, however, to tell any of the men that they are part of an art project. This is not the first time the performance artist has explored notions of public, private and anonymous space. He once spent two weeks as a walking billboard with an iPad on his crotch. So if you see a couple getting amorous in the dairy aisle, don’t call the health inspector. It’s Art.