Honeymoon

This project is the photo album of my honeymoon in a small village in Zanzibar, but it is also - and especially - my reflection on the concepts of exoticism and and travel escapism. It is the new chapter of a bigger project about romantic relationships th

I'm in Zanzibar, it's January 2023.
Everything seems unknown to me, suddenly incomprehensible. Even my partner, who is now "my husband".
I myself feel like an outsider.
I don't know this island, I don't recognize the flavor of the fruit I'm eating, I don't speak the language. Sometimes I feel lonely.
I can decipher little, and only through my senses: anxieties, ambiguity, pleasure, sensuality and repulsion. The poetics of the estrangement.

I kept this honeymoon visual diary to overcome the rhetoric of romance and exoticism and to get rid of the burden of my own expectations.

REFERENCES:

1. “Exoticism is the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.
What triumphs, then, is not the rule of difference and lack of differentiation but instead an eternal incomprehensibility, the irreducible foreignness of cultures, manners, faces, languages.
If savour increases as a function of difference, what could be more savoury than the antagonism of irreducibles, the clash of eternal contrasts?
The irredeemability of the object: 'The essential exoticism is that which the Object has for the Subject.' Exoticism as the fundamental law of the intensity of sensations, of the exaltation of the senses, and thus of living itself”

2. “Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

3. Breaking out of the routine of everyday life that the honeymoon brings can be analyzed by applying a number of sociological concepts. Therefore, one has to mention the need to highlight and accentuate certain elements of social roles of newly-married couples—dramatization of the role with the aim to render the performance more credible and infusion with emotional content appearing in abundance during the first days of married life. “The individual typically infuses his activity with signs which dramatically high- light and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unappar- ent and obscure” (Goffman, 2000, p. 60; Rapoport, 1964, p. 43).

Jakob Isanski, HONEYMOON AS A RITE OF PASSAGE: SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CHANGES IN THE PHENOMENON