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In Destination Sweetheart (curated by Red Star Line Museum, 2020), visitors follow different love migrants through stories, testimonies, objects, and installations.  It shows how love is rarely separated from negotiation, bureaucracy, and struggle.

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Love migration and family reunification have been among the main drivers of legal migration to Belgium over the past fifty years. At the same time, increased mobility through the internet, cheap travel, tourism, and international studies has reshaped how relationships begin and move across borders. This also comes with growing state control over marriages of convenience and the perceived authenticity of relationships.

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Within the exhibition, we presented the installation Between us and everybody else, which reflects on questions of privacy, intimacy, marriage, and the state. We married in 2018 as part of an artistic project on marriage, love, and migration, and to support the sustainability of our relationship.

Through marriage, Anyuta obtained residency as a Russian student. When the project gained media attention, a complaint was filed, suspecting a marriage of convenience, and the public prosecutor became involved. The police carried out a check on our domestic life. Although we do not correspond to a conventional romantic couple, we were able to demonstrate to the authorities that there was no marriage of convenience.

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The police report describing our bedroom became the starting point for an installation in which we reconstructed that same room inside the museum, based on their description. The work reflects on the fragile and often intrusive relationship between the state, intimacy, love, and systems of control.

Whether it concerns moving for an Erasmus romance, a chance encounter that develops into a relationship, or marrying someone from one’s country of origin, love migration takes many forms. Destination Sweetheart explores what it means to go far for love, and what kinds of structures and narratives shape those movements.

 

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