An enclosure of six windows, an impossible place, a latent space: elaborated through different tools, the film starts from the premise of the waiting room. This short inquiry into the straightforward yet symbolic set-up unfolds as a metaphor that gives sound to some of the most basic yet lifeless of our existential concerns. We’re all waiting for the cat to die, or not.
Waiting Room started as a joint exhibition project, motivated at first by a questioning of the act or practice of waiting itself. In this sense, the waiting room serves both as a metaphor and enacment for a compartimentalisation of consciousness and life experience. We were particularly inspired by the western scientific and philosophical crisis around the problem of consciousness and its manifestation in discourse and the problematisation of more individual existential struggles. If waiting involves a mode of alertness to our surroundings, does this grant us a privilegded position towards higher awareness and a critical stance or, conversely, deters us from sensing that which is outside of our immediate perception? By expanding on meta-phorical and lived dimension of waiting, the project creates a site of inquiry that suspends the distiction between action andobservation, encouraging a questioning of its very own premises and the possibilities beyond the “not yet”.
Waiting Room has been exhibited for the first time in 2023, in La Cave, the exhibition space of the Institut français de Roumanie à Cluj–Napoca, Romania. The centerpiece consisted of the shortfilm, shown along 3 other installations.