Waiting room, 1999, L.E.O, Kunsthaus Tacheles Berlin
A waiting room, similar to almost every other waiting room in the world, with a customer counter, chairs, a sterile room in silence. But in an ordinary waiting room, there are costumers waiting for their number to come up so that they could go in. In this “Waiting room” there are no customers and the customer counter does not change at all, it shows the same number all the time.
For the visitors of the “Waiting room” this situation is little irritating because as a visitor of the exhibition you feel like a displaced person. You don’t know what or why this room is for, or why it’s in front of you. What kind of meaning could this silent room without people have? Without people this room changes its meaning totally.
If somebody was there waiting, then the question would be what they were waiting for?
While watching this room, the visitors get the impression that this room might be in function and the people who were waiting, suddenly left this room, or they didn’t want to wait anymore or there was no more reason for waiting.
By hearing the silence and observing this almost empty room, the visitor also gets the feeling that something could have happened, so this space remains like a time capsule. Observing this room becomes observing time, stopped time or non-time in non-place. The visitor become a discoverer, the discoverer of a graveyard without funerals, or of a forgotten monument of the time.