Divorce Index — Natasha Caruana

We are familiar with idyllic images of the seaside equating everlasting bliss. The data tells a different story. Natasha Caruana used open data to identify coastline towns as the British settings with the highest divorce rates. She pursued further social datasets to try to identify why. ‘Divorce Index’ is a filmic response to her findings. It presents a couple in disheveled wedding clothes performing a curious dance at Hastings’ double deck promenade, Bottle Alley. Each movement is a choreographed gesture interpreting pressures which may affect a marriage, including unemployment, healthcare, libraries, access to higher education and gambling.

The Curtain of Broken Dreams is constructed of long interlinked chains of pawned, discarded wedding rings create a physical representation of 1% of divorces in the UK over a typical 12-month period. As we become physically enmeshed in the evidence of the breakdown of 111,169 relationships, we may ask ourselves if seeking the right conditions as well as the right person is essential to everlasting love, and if we would consider relocating if the data told us there was no hope here.

Words by Hannah Redler, exhibition catalogue, New Observatory, FACT, UK, 2017