Sitting on a bus wondering where to go and what to do
2010
Performance outside Maltese Prime Ministers Office Auberge de Castille
20 Classified Migrants from a Detention Centre
1 Coach & Driver
Sitting on a Bus Wondering Where to Go and What to Do (2010) occupies a pivotal position within Mark Mangion's ongoing investigation into displacement, spectatorship, and the political construction of visibility. Developed in the wake of a series of films, performances, and sculptural works exploring migration and public space, the project formed part of Little Constellation, Geography of Proximity at the Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Roberto Daolio and Alessandro Castiglioni. Characteristically, the work employed a simple yet highly charged gesture to expose the complex relationships between power, representation, and social perception.
The work consisted of twenty migrants from one of Malta's detention centres seated inside a parked and idling coach positioned directly outside Auberge de Castille, the Office of the Prime Minister. At the time, all participants were awaiting decisions regarding their legal status and permission to remain in the country. Nothing overtly dramatic occurred. The bus remained stationary. The participants sat and waited. Yet within this apparent inactivity lay the work's critical force.
Mangion's intervention transformed a familiar and largely invisible image—the parked tourist coach—into a politically charged tableau. Throughout Europe, coaches filled with visitors waiting between destinations have become a commonplace feature of urban life. Their occupants are rarely noticed. They exist in a transitional state, suspended between one site of consumption and the next. By replacing tourists with detained migrants and relocating this image to one of Malta's most symbolically important centres of political authority, the work destabilised an otherwise banal social scene and forced it into visibility.
The title itself is significant. Sitting on a Bus Wondering Where to Go and What to Do evokes a condition of uncertainty, hesitation, and suspended agency. On one level it describes an ordinary moment of indecision. On another, it reflects the lived reality of individuals caught within bureaucratic systems that determine movement, belonging, and legal existence. The title shifts between the mundane and the existential, mirroring the broader operation of the work itself.
Central to the project is the notion of waiting. Political theorists and migration scholars have frequently identified waiting as a defining condition of contemporary border regimes. For asylum seekers and migrants, waiting is not merely the passive passage of time but a form of governance. Decisions concerning residence, citizenship, detention, and deportation often produce prolonged periods of uncertainty in which individuals possess little control over their futures. The work materialises this condition within public space. The stationary bus becomes a monument to suspended time, while its occupants embody the social and psychological consequences of bureaucratic delay.
Positioned outside Auberge de Castille, the work also created a direct spatial relationship between those subjected to governmental decisions and the institution responsible for exercising political authority. Yet this relationship remained unresolved. The migrants were neither protesting nor petitioning. They simply occupied the space. Their presence generated a silent confrontation between state power and those whose lives were profoundly shaped by it.
The project's effectiveness derives from its ability to blur the distinction between reality and performance. Passers-by encountering the coach may initially have interpreted it as an ordinary vehicle awaiting departure. Gradually, however, the scene revealed itself as something else. The familiarity of the image gave way to discomfort as viewers recognised the political implications of what they were witnessing. The work operated through this moment of uncertainty, exploiting the instability between observation and interpretation.
In doing so, Mangion addressed broader questions surrounding spectatorship. Who is looking at whom? Who occupies the position of observer and who becomes the object of observation? The work subtly inverted conventional dynamics of visibility. The migrants, accustomed to being viewed through media representations, political discourse, and administrative categorisation, became visible within a highly controlled artistic framework. At the same time, viewers found themselves implicated within the encounter. The work redirected attention toward the assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices that structure acts of looking.
This tension recalls Michel Foucault's observations regarding visibility and power, while also engaging with more contemporary debates surrounding the representation of migrants within art and media. Migration is frequently rendered visible through images of crisis, overcrowding, detention, and humanitarian emergency. Such representations often reduce individuals to symbols of broader political narratives. Mangion's intervention avoids these familiar visual codes. The participants are neither victims nor heroes. They are simply present. Their stillness becomes a form of resistance against the demand for spectacle.
Yet the work does not allow itself an easy ethical position. One of its most compelling aspects is its willingness to confront the contradictions inherent within socially engaged artistic practice. The project openly raises questions about artistic authorship, institutional framing, and the potential instrumentalisation of vulnerable individuals. To what extent does the artwork reproduce the very power relations it seeks to critique? Can participation ever be separated from representation? What responsibilities emerge when artistic gestures intersect with lives marked by legal and social precarity?
Rather than attempting to resolve these questions, the work incorporates them into its structure. The discomfort generated by the piece extends beyond its political content to encompass the conditions of its own production. Viewers are invited not only to reflect upon migration and exclusion but also upon the mechanisms through which art transforms lived experience into symbolic form.
The bus itself functions as a powerful metaphor throughout the work. Traditionally associated with mobility, tourism, and movement, it becomes paradoxically immobilised. Its occupants are passengers who are unable to depart. The promise of travel remains suspended. The vehicle becomes a space of containment rather than transit, reflecting the broader contradictions of contemporary migration regimes in which movement and restriction exist simultaneously.
Within the context of Malta, a nation situated at the frontier of European migration routes, the work acquired particular urgency. During the late 2000s, public discourse surrounding migration was increasingly shaped by anxiety, securitisation, and political polarisation.
Against this backdrop, Sitting on a Bus Wondering Where to Go and What to Do disrupted established narratives by introducing ambiguity where certainty was expected. It refused the simplifications through which migrants were commonly represented and instead foregrounded conditions of uncertainty, vulnerability, and waiting.
Ultimately, the work transforms an ordinary image into a complex political encounter. Through minimal means, Mangion exposes the invisible structures that govern movement, belonging, and visibility within contemporary society. The parked coach becomes a temporary theatre in which questions of power, spectatorship, and human agency are played out without resolution. Neither protest nor spectacle, the work exists in a suspended state, mirroring the condition of those it brings into view. In doing so, it compels viewers to confront not only the realities of migration but also their own position within the systems of looking, judging, and categorising through which those realities are understood.