"While You Wait - Community through productivity" by Ceri Baxter
While You Wait aims to create waiting spaces in central Paris for displaced peoples. Forcing someone to wait is a manipulation of their time, and migrants spend disproportionate amounts of time waiting for others to make decisions on their behalf.
Inspired by migrant chefs, who are forced to wait for public transport to start again after their nighttime shifts in basement kitchens, the project proposes a series of rooftop devices that carve into and slowly destroy Palais Brongniart - the historical stock exchange. Diggers extract limestone from beneath the streets of Paris which is then pressed into bricks - these are carved by those in the Waiting community with stories about their new lives or poems from home.
The scheme aims to help them to reclaim their autonomy from the authorities and strives to make this previously invisible community visible.
While You Wait - Community through productivity
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Perspective