The architecture of waiting: a room, maybe one with seats – usually not many, not enough, but some. Maybe it offers a margin of comfort, or even distraction – a pile of old magazines, a mounted television set. In a way, just waiting has become easier to avoid. We’re so often occupied, on the go, or distracted by something. What if we were to consciously wait — for what? Doesn’t matter — just wait. No reading materials, no television, no podcast or music. No pacing, strolling, or fidgeting. No conversation. Just idle thoughts. Observations and feelings. Just attention.

And so we waited. And waited. And waited. Just for fifteen minutes a day. For 20 days in a row. At the same time, but not the same place.

Almost like a rehearsal. One that doesn't necessarily apply to every waiting context, but at least to those minor, everyday ones. Those small, shared annoyances. 

During this project, not just waiting, but also boredom, flow, and distraction were some of the key words for us. We thought about waiting as a physical space — like an airport or elevator — a non-place, possibly enclosed by windows or mirrors, those hazy boundaries.

We wondered: is waiting necessarily something passive? Maybe to give into distraction, to go with the flow, is the passive part. The flow can feel comfortable and effortless. It keeps the thoughts and feelings away — like how a quick, intuitive drawing turns out best, and as soon as you start to think, you get tangled up. The decision to break from that flow, to instead be fully in the moment of waiting, is perhaps something far more active. Even within this in-between space, you can’t stop the flow of time. You can only connect to it more. Feel it more.

For us, waiting actually required quite a bit of organization. It meant being in touch, checking in daily, discussing which fifteen minute window would work for us both. We were curious how the same moment and stretch of time, of waiting, is experienced by two people, separately but together.

The correspondences that emerged were uncanny at times, if not outright unexpected. You can flip through the enclosed booklets to see those parallel moments unfold through the words and images that bounded them. Or jumble up our diary-like entries, move outside of linear time, to find parallels elsewhere.

Texts an pictures have been published in a riso-zine, in collaboratoon by krater books, june 2025.