In this guest post, Anuj Daga describes the results and impact of ‘The Waiting Room’ exhibition, which was supported by a Seminar Series Awards grant and a Knowledge Mobilisation Award from the USF.
Building on the discussion and material accumulated along the work done under the USF Seminar Series Award since 2023, ‘The Waiting Room’ was an exhibition-proposal to invite participants of the ICAS13 conference held in Surabaya Indonesia, to linger through the inquiries of the research programme ‘Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in Global South’. Sponsored through the grant programs of the Urban Studies Foundation since 2023, the project has grown substantially through collaborative networks and intellectual exchanges sustained through the support of the French Institute Pondicherry, Humanities Across Borders, and International Institution for Asian Studies, Leiden, and the Lagos Studies Association. ‘Youth on the Move’ investigates diverse and nonlinear space-time relationships that the youth inhabit and co-produce while navigating urban space across Asia-Africa. ‘The Waiting Room’ was a knowledge-sharing exhibition narrating stories of youth across Africa-Asia, which was documented in collaboration with the growing network of actors and institutions that have germinated through the ongoing fieldwork and across the region.
The five-day exhibition held within Airlangga University’s ASEEC Tower brought together studies from various disciplines of architecture, planning, anthropology, art, sociology, and allied humanities spaces that focused on spaces, times, and lives of youth on the move within the Global South. The stories, which were mounted in a variety of forms such as images, texts, videos, art, objects, and interactive media, demonstrated a host of allied practices and subjectivities through which the urban youth perform the politics of living within the global south, navigating the never fully implemented infrastructures, lack of sufficient state support or the pursuit of desires and destinations to escape everyday anxieties. The practices invented to reconcile or negotiate these situations demonstrate modes of enterprise and meaning-making and showcase a liminal situation of becoming, thus bringing the notion of a static space, like the waiting room, in dialogue with that of being on the move.
In terms of the curatorial strategy, the exhibition was imagined as an intervention into the lobby of the ASEEC Tower of Airlangga University, which was the nodal point for conference visitors to register, access, and attend various programs of the event. Literally, ‘The Waiting Room’ was imagined as a place within the ICAS13 conference through which people not only pass by, sit, idle, take rest, and chit chat but also note information, read stories, make connections, wander, contemplate, thereby activating the work of imagination. Therefore, it took the form of a transient portal – a thoroughfare that became and introduced passers-by to the landscape of ‘youth on the move’ in the global south. The exhibition was constructed using packaging wood and cardboard sheets – one of the materials that the marginalized populations use to make temporary shelters. The layout was organized along a cruciform axis with a centre within the site – that could allow maximum porosity of moving public. Within these conduits, conference participants encountered the various works exhibited.
Stories of African salons as waiting spaces marked the key facade of the exhibition. In many African and Asian cities, hair salons and barbershops are essential sites of livelihoods and identities for urban youth. They are not only means of economic struggles but also spaces for socializing, self-care, aspirations, and leisure. In conjunction with this Quidi Feng’s work highlighted how Afro wigs are a major part of African fashion; yet most human hair used in Afro wigs is sourced from Asia, including China, Vietnam, and India, almost recreating a wig shop in Meibocheng, the largest wig mall in the world, located in Guangzhou.
Anu Sabhlok, an urban geographer teaching at ISSER, Mohali, presented a travelogue in the form of a flipbook that told the stories of the 90,000 or so seasonal labourers who travel every year to build roads in the upper reaches of the Himalayas for India’s Border Roads Organization (BRO). DBSA Art Program’s 2019 Storytelling Workshop in the Mathare slum (Nairobi, Kenya) demonstrated powerful expressions of the daily survival experiences of the youth in these spaces in the form of comic books. Srilankan filmmaker Nadya Bhimani Perera’s film ‘While She Slept’ documented the sudden influx of Chinese male migrant labour in the small town of Hambanthota in the South of Srilanka and how it produced new anxieties within the youth.
Prakriti Shukla’s photo essay captures the daily struggles of the youth once engaged in agrarian and aqueous economies of the Sunderbans, West Bengal, India, and how they (have to) move across the amphibious landscape of the region to reach the city for work under the changing environmental and urbanizing conditions. Photographer Wong Liensheng put together an artist book documenting the forced transformation of the Dinghaiqiao neighbourhood over the northeastern corner of Shanghai that was once a shelter and a haven for industrial workers, immigrants from northern Jiangsu, vegetable vendors, fishmongers, butchers, and migrant workers amongst many others.
“The Waiting Room” Exhibition
The heart of the exhibition space was a representational version of the danfo bus – the principal means through which the working class made do with mobility in Nigeria. This centre hosted year-long engagements, experiments, and discussions by the Youth on the Move programme across Nigeria and Shanghai, along with virtual lectures. This was an opportunity for the visitors to engage with the intellectual and artistic manifestations of the research, which was an interactive collage of texts, hyperlinks to hip-hop compositions, toys, photographs, and spaces encountered by the team during their fieldwork. A collection of culturally specific toy vehicles across Asia and Africa spoke of everyday urban mobilities within the global South and the way they reflect the region’s dynamic urban spatial politics.
One of the highlights of the exhibition was a performance-story extended from the associated roundtable session “Linger Longer”, titled “ÌGBÀLÈ / Pasca Ruang / Post-Space”, by Segun Adefila, founder of Crown Troupe of Africa, (Nigeria) in collaboration with Surabaya performance artists from Studio IMMATERIAL (Ryan Herdiansyah, Dimas Ijat, Rezza Lellyana, and Dwiputra Rizkyandhani). Performed within the very space of the exhibition, the movement artists transformed the space into a shrine – also a space of waiting to reconcile the past, present, and future – leading the audiences to rediscover the still-becoming geography of Asia-Africa indexed through the stories in the exhibition. Writer Al Soewardi documents her experience of witnessing the performance here and recounts how it made her realize how she was “a migrant, having currently resided in a city that [she] did not in fact grow up in.”
Thus ‘The Waiting Room’ was imagined as a pause in the research journey of ‘Youth on the Move’ to bring together the stories of youth performing in urban space in the global south for a public discussion through the format of an exhibition. The ICAS 13 conference offered a productive space of engagement for scholars from across the global south, who shared, reflected, and contemplated these ideas together and suggested new trajectories for the project. The research team is now foreseeing the possibility of a book project that can emerge from this curatorial venture to push our interrogation into new directions.
For more information about the Surabaya Exhibition, check this Website. For more on the Project, check YOTM’s Website and Facebook.