Waiting For (2017)
Participatory Public Installation
London, United Kingdom
London, United Kingdom
Untitled, (Waiting For Love), 2017Untitled (Waiting For A Better World), 2017Untitled (Waiting for Chance), 2017 |
Waiting For (2017) is a participatory public installation that explores the everyday notions of waiting, by seeking to disrupt and slow down the pace of life. By adopting the manufactured aesthetic and visual language of the traffic light signage, the question of waiting forces the busy pedestrian to pause and reconsider the mundane gesture of waiting as an everyday endurance. As an attempt to challenge authorship, the recreated public signs transformed public waiting spaces into social spaces where public can participate freely and democratically.
Doodle responses from the public ranged from the deeply personal, to the light hearted and humorous, as well as to the socio-political. Far from being a passive activity, the piece explores how waiting can generate positive creative energies and new forms of understanding. Taking the everyday habitual to the global political, the piece also explores notions of waiting in the age of political uncertainty, social conflict and tensions. How does waiting, this key dimension of modernity, hold seeds for social and political action? What are we waiting for? Are we just passing time? Or hoping something better will somehow come up? The streets have long embodied the public sphere, and I’m fascinated by how the everyday space can be a valuable space in which art can stimulate conversations, trigger unexpected forms of improvisatory exchange and generate an awareness of shared interests between strangers. |