Fent cua / While waiting is a new project by Urša Sekirnik and Joana Serra, an participatory performance that takes inspiration from the action of queueing and puts the experience of the public at the center of the research.
Queuing – an imposed break in our daily lives. A time in between, a non-time, an everyday action that puts our body in a very concrete state, forces us to stop and wait, and positions us in conditions of power or vulnerability depending on the context and the purpose of waiting in line.
At a first glance, queueing seems such an annoying every-day action, but the more one thinks about it, the more complex it gets, since all the notions and depths of the topic start to unfold. It is true that waiting in line is mostly a mundane act – we all wait at some point. Usually for something rather banal, when we wait at the checkout, in a traffic jam, at the post office, and we rarely stop to think and relativize this waiting, that is for many people not banal at all, as the wait can also be for an important operation, crossing the border, visa… Therefore, this every-day action raises many important topics such as social status, xenophobia, bureaucracy, gender, origin and discriminations of various kinds that the project wishes to address.
In our busy lives, waiting in line is an obstacle. It is not in accordance with the rhythm of our society, in which we always want to be served first, get to the goal the fastest way possible, achieve everything quickly. Waiting creates anxiety, it breaks our individualistic approach to life. It forces us to stop. So, could we instead of experiencing this imposed break as an annoyance, look at it differently? Could it be considered not as lost time, waisted in the expectation of something we want to achieve, get, accomplish, buy, but as time we gain, time that is given to us?
Exposing the above mentioned topics, the Fent Cua / While waiting project opens space and gives time for reflection on different aspects of queueing and waiting.
URŠA SEKIRNIK 