No honeymoon is a documentary about a honeymoon that we take at the moment we have decided to

divorce. We travel together to Seoul and film each other during a journey that marks not the beginning,

but the end of our marriage.

 

The work adopts the recognizable form of a honeymoon DIY recording, but removes the future

that normally gives this form its meaning. It starts from the assumption that the honeymoon functions

as a cultural script through which a relationship represents itself: a newly married couple travels

together, to unfamiliar places, photographs and films each other, and in doing so builds the archive of

their shared life. The meaning of filming each other therefore does not lie entirely in the moment itself:

it registers “we were here,” while simultaneously anticipating a future moment in which that same

couple will look at the image and be able to say: “we were there together.” These images place the present within an expected continuity.

 

In Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on amateur and family photography in Photography: A Middle-Brow Art,

photography appears as a socially structured practice through which families and other groups record

their existence, but also symbolically perpetuate their cohesion. According to Bourdieu, weddings

and other family gatherings are privileged photographic moments because the image participates in the ritual through which a group represents itself to itself. The photograph therefore does not merely preserve a pre-existing unity; it also constitutes and reproduces that unity.

 

No honeymoon adopts this practice, but under radically altered temporal conditions. We continue

to perform many of the actions associated with a honeymoon and move together through the

unfamiliar city while building a shared archive of the journey, but we do so while preparing for

a divorce. The actions and outward structure of the honeymoon are preserved, while the shared

future toward which they would normally point disappears. The honeymoon, both as a ritual practice and in the way it is documented, is therefore appropriated and hollowed out.

 

The fact that the honeymoon takes place in Seoul initially carries no symbolic meaning. The film does

not explain why this particular destination was chosen, except that Anyuta wanted to go there. Seoul

is therefore not introduced as a metaphor for the relationship or the separation. The meaning of the

place only emerges during the journey.

 

The possibility of traveling on the other hand is not entirely neutral. While mobility is relatively self-evident for me, Anyuta’s has been shaped by migration, nationality and legal dependency. The

journey takes place after she has acquired Belgian citizenship, changing her legal position and freedom of movement. The honeymoon therefore also makes visible how unevenly the freedom to cross borders is distributed through passports, visa regimes and residency status.

 

This introduces another ambiguity: the radically different relationships to mobility implied by tourism

and migration. The tourist can generally experience movement as temporary, voluntary and consumable: entering a foreign environment, interpreting and photographing it, and then leaving again. The position of who is looked at are distributed differently. The person who elsewhere was made

legible through the category of the foreigner can now participate in making another place and its

inhabitants legible as foreign. This also makes the act of looking itself less innocent. Who has the privilege of arriving somewhere and asking what that place means? Who becomes the object through which someone else attempts to understand themselves? What happens when a foreign city becomes material for a European art film about a private relationship?

 

The documentary thus inhabits two cultural scripts whose conventions remain intact while

the positions from which we perform them have shifted. What is at stake is what happens when

they continue to be performed after the relations that conventionally organize them have changed.