Sitting on a bus wondering where to go and what to do
 2010
Performance outside Maltese Prime Ministers Office
20 Classified Migrants from a Detention Centre
1 Coach & Driver


 
Between 2007 and 2009, I developed a wider body of films, performances, and sculptural works examining ideas of displacement, spectatorship, and political tension. Sitting on a bus wondering where to go and what to do (2010) emerged from this context and formed part of the exhibition Little Constellation, Geography of Proximity at the MCA, curated by Roberto Daolio and Alessandro Castiglioni.
The work involved twenty migrants from one of Malta’s detention centres, all still awaiting permission to remain in the country, seated inside a parked and idling coach positioned directly outside Auberge de Castille, the Office of the Prime Minister. The gesture deliberately blurred the boundaries between lived reality and staged fiction, producing a situation that felt tense, misplaced, and deeply uncomfortable.
The project stemmed from observing tourists waiting passively on parked coaches while moving through sites of cultural consumption. By repositioning this familiar image within the context of migration and state power, the work sought to expose the fragility of social clichés and stereotypes surrounding the “migrant other,” particularly within the political climate of Malta at the time. What initially appeared to be a calm and benign scene quickly became politically charged, creating an uneasy confrontation between passer-by and subject, viewer and viewed.
Questions of time, waiting, and suspended belonging were central to the work. The stationary coach and its seated occupants created a temporary theatre of uncertainty in the heart of governmental authority, forcing viewers to confront their own position within the encounter. The work also raised difficult questions around the ethics and manipulation inherent in artistic gesture: how performance, representation, and institutional framing intersect with the lived vulnerability of individuals who, at that moment, possessed little social or political power.