[Humanities Across Borders] The Waiting Room for Youth on the Move in the Global South

Exhibition Details: THE WAITING ROOM

The Waiting Room is an exhibition-proposal to invite participants of the ICAS13 conference to linger through the inquiries of the research programme ‘Youth on the Move: Performing Urban Space in Global South’. Sponsored through the grant programmes 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 at Pondicherry (IFP) India, the Humanities Across Borders (HAB) programme of the International Institute for Asian Studies Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Lagos Studies Association.

‘Youth on the Move’ investigates diverse and non linear space-time relationships that the youth inhabit and co-produce while navigating urban space across Asia-Africa. ‘The Waiting Room’ is a knowledge-sharing exhibition narrating about 50 stories of youth across Africa-Asia documented in collaboration with the growing network of actors and institutions that have germinated through the ongoing field work and across the region.

Literally, ‘The Waiting Room’ is a place within the conference through which people not only pass by, sit, idle, catch up on breath, take rest, chit chat but also note information, read stories, make connections, wander, contemplate; activating the work of imagination. Metaphorically, it indexes 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 traverse desires and destinations to escape everyday anxieties. The practices invented to reconcile or circumvent these situations demonstrate modes of enterprise and meaning making, and showcase a liminal situation of becoming, thus bringing the notion of a static space, i.e. the waiting room, in dialogue with that of being on the move.

Imagined as a transitory and fragmentary portal / pavilion within the conference site, the waiting room is a receptacle of multiple temporalities in material and space that hint at the politics of (in)visibility of youth in the region of Africa-Asia. It brings viewers to consider the dialectics of youth-actions and corresponding (un)folding urbanities through stories that may offer new insights into their own practice of maneuvering their respective contexts. In the form and material held within the waiting room, visitors may engage and play, make friendships, maneuver around rules, share information - thus building agency and networks for the(ir) future.