MTR Crossrail has commissioned me various art projects for the urban re-qualification of selected Crossrail’s stations that connect the East End to the centre of London.
Waiting is Bifido's mural theme in the station of Forest Gate, London.
The artist, using the paste-up technique, has created an artwork composed by different subjects represented between two sets of identical clocks, that open and close the scene, framing a non-existent temporal space. Here, in this suspended space and time, a lot of things happen and the wait becomes a journey itself.
A woman serves tea in a giant cup, almost falling into it; a man, tired of his routine, needs to charge his batteries; a tree man loose his leaves that magically turn into butterflies in the stomach of another man who's in love.
Meanwhile looks at the spectator waiting for his train; an everyday repetitive sense of wait clashes with the speed of the train.
Wait and speed are the concepts at the core of this eclectic narrative; they combine and relate in an oxymoronic way.
Bifido's rhapsody unravels in a magic and uncanny space, giving the station a new poetry, donating the travellers a new fantasy. The aim of the artist is to stop time and the daily grind to create a moment out of time, to create “our time”.
In order to do so, proportions are distorted. Big and small, tall and tiny. These figures are no longer seen from the regular prospective, but from the subjective and ever changing one assumed in the personal and suspended time, that is the time of waiting.
Meanwhile covers a suggestive brick wall in one of Forest Gate Station's platform.
This site specific artwork is part of a vast urban regeneration program on a MTR Crossrail commission.