Badasyan’s project asks powerful questions about today’s hook-up culture, particularly within the gay experience, and how that in turn translates to loneliness. Casual, consistent sex is not only an old gay stereotype, but is also easily enabled by apps like Grindr, Scruff or Mister. Badasyan’s performance may seem ludicrous at first, but he’s only pushing an everyday reality to its extremes.

Badasyan expects to explore the relationship between the culture of hook-ups, loneliness and the idea of “non-places,” a concept in the work of 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.

By meeting up with men in places such as parks, Badasyan will explore what happens to sexual interaction when it occurs in a non-place. It’s an experience he knows about from the time he spent performing in Glasgow, while simultaneously looking for men: “I would go to [the park] every night and have sex with guys … until 5 o’clock [or] 6 o’clock in the morning. And I was always … I felt very bad, I was crying all the time. I am always sad after these kind of meetings.”

He wonders what it means for a person to become as amorphous and cold as the locations themselves. “Eventually I’ll be like a non-place,” he said. “so it’ll be like a supermarket. I’ll go on the date and then I’ll go back.”