"Why Wouldn't You Date Me?"
by Ines Borovac
this piece is part of OPTIMISED LOVE, our first digital collection of works.
Through the project “Why won’t you date me?” I am researching and carefully analysing the links between the folk rituals of courtship in colonial Europe through the socio-political lens and its influence and morphed presence in the various channels of dating apps through my personal experience.
Fascinated by the omnipresence of marriage through my childhood and its importance of shaping the society in Croatia and the neighbouring Balkan countries I started this project with the exciting idea of deconstruction of the marriage with the aim to redesign the patriarchy out of it. I wrote a project for the Kamen art residency, situated in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of the town Trebinje in Bosnia and Herzegovina where a tremendous amount of weddings happen every weekend. The founder was also an artist and educator from Bosnia who spent most of her time in the Netherlands. I remember her enthusiasm for accepting my proposal in an unusually short notice. I could sense she was identifying with the sense of urgency in my project which I can only assume comes from her personal experience.
Coming fresh out of university, lost, young and impoverished, this acceptance letter rose me from the ashes of the “unfortunately” emails. I came to Bosnia, and I started working on the project. After attending a few weddings and doing extensive research on the Croatian constitution law and a civil marriage contract, I wrote my own prenuptial agreement. Apart from that I made my version of a Croatian folk costume that a young lady would wear to indicate she was ready to be approached by the men from her village and give them the opportunity to try to win her over. The performance took place in the shape of “dates” where people could sit across from me at the table and negotiate my prenuptial agreement. I went on 5 dates, 3 with men and 2 with women, each of them lasting around an hour. Turns out people love to speak about their relationships to strangers more than I was expecting. I did not grow attached to this project, on the contrary, I began asking myself “Why am I doing this?”. I am not sure if I even want to marry, nor if I even believe in marriage. Can a construct contaminated with the heteronormative values, and constructed for the sake of perpetuating the patriarchal distribution of power ever be deconstructed?
Instead of letting my liquid data be exploited and gamified, I freely and consensually offered control and surveillance over the conditions of my dates, through which I referenced the traditional Croatian courting ritual in which the couple is rigorously surveilled by the physical presence of the elderly. Using the gambling properties of dating apps, I designed a live gamified experience by giving the opportunity to the people in my hometown to follow the live streamed dates on a public platform and send the conditions through the liquid data, instructions from a specially designed app which will be sending the information back to date. If we use the context of analog love traditions and folk rituals as a space to infiltrate the newly practiced digital love rituals, will it help us understand the detrimental damage of perpetual homosocial relations and their power abuse driven by the thirst for our liquid bodies (data)? I am not sure, but at least I can say that I tried, whilst still looking for love.
𝓲𝓷𝓮𝓼 𝓫𝓸𝓻𝓸𝓿𝓪𝓬
Artist & designer.