Waiting for asylum plays a major role in the everyday lives of many refugees. I have met refugees who have been unable to live self-determined lives for a long time because events and laws have put them in an opaque waiting situation. They were waiting for the decision on their asylum application, then for further papers, for an apartment, for their family. They were waiting to be able to go back to school or work.
In these encounters, I felt the waiting as existential and permanently present.
What meanings can waiting have? This waiting is different from the one I know.
It is a waiting that I cannot comprehend. My own waiting suddenly felt very trivial.
To approach the question of what other people are waiting for, I installed some of the photos from the project What am I doing here in a kiosk building on a subway platform Venloer Straße/Gürtel. The kiosk was cleared for demolition and I was able to use it for a temporary interim use (January to September 2019).
I used the atmosphere of the kiosk and used photos and a text in such a way that I did not break the appearance of the kiosk, but complemented it.
Unclear outlines of people and a quote from a young refugee could be seen.
I observed that many people on the platform noticed the change and roamed around the kiosk to read the entire text.
After a few days, I started putting postcards with the questions “What am I doing here?” and “What am I waiting for?” on the outer counter of the kiosk, next to a sign: “Trade answer for cookie”
I got an amazing number of answers.
I later stuck these to the inside of the kiosk windows so that they could also be read from the outside: My first attempt to connect different dimensions of waiting states with each other and, through the different answers, to open up a collection of waiting for the viewers.
Over time, many stickers and new tags collected on the outside pane, which partially covered the postcards, but also seemed to comment on them.
One sticker said:
“The Hambach Forest is not waiting for your bachelor’s degree.”
I understood it as an appeal to me to think about whether “doing” is really the opposite of “waiting”?
Where does waiting end and where does action begin?
Thanks to the Montag Stiftung Kunst und Gesellschaft for their support and the great contribution under
