The Rhythm of Waiting

The Rhythm of Waiting is a visual study of time, rhythm, and the seemingly uneventful moments that make up everyday life. Filmed in Istanbul, the piece turns its attention away from the city's constant movement and towards its pauses: people waiting for someone, for transport, for a light to change, or simply for the next moment to arrive. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis, it considers waiting not as empty or wasted time, but as a social and embodied experience — one shaped by repetition, infrastructure, anticipation, and the rhythms of urban life.

Through scenes of bodies temporarily suspended within one of the world's most restless cities, the work asks what becomes visible when, for a moment, nothing appears to be happening.

Our relationship with time is stranger than we tend to think.

We measure our days in hours, appointments, deadlines and departures, yet a significant part of everyday life takes place in between these measurable events.

We often underestimate how much of our lives are spent waiting — for someone to arrive, for a bus to come, for a message to be answered, for a door to open, for something to begin.

Waiting occupies an enormous amount of time, yet we rarely count it as time properly lived. We treat it as a gap between more meaningful moments, something to be endured before life can resume.

But what if waiting is not a pause in life, but one of its most ordinary forms? We tend to understand it as empty time — time in which nothing is happening. But from an anthropological perspective, waiting can be understood as a social practice in its own right. It is a particular way of inhabiting time, one that reveals how everyday life is organised and how individuals negotiate structures that are largely outside their control.

Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis offers a way of thinking about this. For Lefebvre, everyday life is organised through rhythms: the cyclical rhythms of bodies, sleep, hunger and seasons; the linear rhythms imposed by work, transport, schedules and institutions; and the countless small repetitions through which social life becomes recognisable. A city is not only a collection of buildings and people, it emerges from the intersection of these rhythms.

Waiting makes these rhythms strangely tangible.

Observe the waiting body.

It yawns. It looks for something in the pocket. It reaches for a phone. It lights a cigarette. It looks into the distance, searching for the thing that will eventually end the waiting.

These gestures may seem insignificant, but repetition gives them a rhythm. The body responds to an absence — to something that has not yet happened — by creating its own small routines.

There is also something profoundly social about waiting. Strangers who have never met can suddenly become participants in the same temporal arrangement.

A group of strangers queuing in a restaurant line have little in common beyond the fact that, for a few minutes, their rhythms have been synchronised.

They occupy the same physical space and orient themselves toward the same anticipated event. They may never speak, yet they share a small portion of lived time.

The city is full of these fleeting collectivities.

When people are given nothing to do, the small practices through which they organise their existence become unusually visible.

Waiting exposes how we occupy our bodies, how we manage boredom, how we orient ourselves towards strangers, how dependent our everyday lives are on schedules and systems beyond our control.

The waiting body is never completely still.

It is simply moving to a different rhythm.