‘Until Death Do Us Part’ is a two-year photographic project on weddings in Europe, with an accent on cross-cultural couples and certain cultural meanderings, the product of the constant shifts of borders, migrations, globalisation and acculturation. The project represents a visual investigation of the phenomenon of the wedding ceremony and party as one of the crucial anthropological genres, which has for thousands of years played a pivotal role in the ritual life of the human race. In essence, this phenomenon has remained unchanged, despite newly emerging trends and cultural, racial or gender traversings, and in spite of the fact that a relatively frequent changes of partners “for life” nowadays (especially among celebrities and the rich) is becoming an indicator that marriage as an institution is no longer regarded as something so hugely rewarding. According to recent statistics, in the 21st century, the percentage of men and woman marrying is ever decreasing. It seems that the “tyranny of the moment” (as Thomas Hylland Eriksen calls it) had made a breakthrough into the sphere of intimacy, and the classical maxim “until death do us part”, in fact conceals at least a tiny release clause. However, this project on weddings in Europe aims, among other things, at showing that there are still many couples who believe in wedded unities, although the phenomenon of the wedding ceremony is in many cases becoming an excuse for a show-off parade.
What we often find exotic far away, may in fact be what we hunger for in vain at home. If it is true that love is often the pursuit in the other of qualities we lack in ourselves, then it is no coincidence that many people, now that it has become “normal”, choose partners from different cultures, thereby trying to weld themselves closer to values missing from their own cultures. This aspect of the project also alludes to a new scientific prognosis on the future of human race – the prediction of the evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics, who expects the human race to reach its peak around the year 3000, and then split in two in the far future: the tall, beautiful and intelligent on one side, and the short, dumb and ugly on the other side, with all racial differences ironed out due to long-term interbreeding.