As a migrant, the airport waiting zone has always held a strange romance for me—an “in-between space” where you’re not quite anywhere. Not yet arrived, no longer where you came from. Suspended. Absent. Misplaced. It’s a space charged with imagination, longing, and uncertainty.

During the pandemic, these places—once among the busiest in the world—emptied out. They became charged with a new kind of intensity: loneliness, stillness, despair. The entire world felt paused, as if it too had become one vast waiting zone.

This work captures that atmosphere by casting walls from antibacterial soap and solidifying the 1.5-meter void between waiting bench seats—each bench marked by a single crossed-out seat, enforcing safe distance. In a world of "contactless everything," these surfaces became the only thing it was still safe to touch. Yet the suffocating smell of soap fills the air—sterile, thick, almost impossible to breathe.

Waiting Zone reflects on the sensual and physical relationship between the human body and public space, revealing how architecture both separates and connects us. It asks what happens to spaces designed for presence when they become monuments to absence.