‘While You Wait’ is a series of (relatively oblique) responses to the city of Manchester, and also the venue of twenty+3 projects in Whalley Range.

As a former living room, Anachron-Gen aim to use the space to challenge the notions of ‘the exhibition’, assembling a collection of objects, writing and digital recordings, drawing together divergent ideas to become a place to navigate, inhabit and re-imagine the city once more.

Our work acknowledges the construction of place – identity out of information, often remotely, from historical and representational discourses.  As a number of objects or possessions presented in a front room, the work treads a fine line between consumption and production, attempting to create a space to work things out.

The group’s decision to take ‘Manchester’ as a starting-point for this work (as a loose theme to bind together a cluster of disparate elements) has grown from a recognition of different personal relationships to the city, through time spent as a group in conversation, exploring and getting lost in its streets and neighbourhoods.

As a tourist in a new city there are often ‘places you should see’, focal points promoted by a council or tourist organisation.  Living a short train ride away we are neither tourist nor inhabitant, more day-tripper.  The short time spent there, coupled with the easy option of returning means there is both pressure and luxury of time, triggering the desire for a genuine experience or understanding of a place – it gives a reason to be there.  However, in searching it emerges it might not be that simple.  The map is wrong; the directions are crap.  You stray from the itinerary; you miss somewhere out and before long are given over to hours of wandering through nondescript parks, and getting lost in bland, post-war estates.  Nothing quite matches it for getting to know somewhere.

This way, small fragments of a place are presented that give up nothing more than what you see in front of you.  It might be a bullet-hole in a wall, or a plaque on a house, or acres and acres of a cemetery, crammed full of anonymous gravestones.  But it is just as likely to be a tree growing at a funny angle or a crisp packet caught in a hedge.  No tour guide to confirm a story, no curator’s notes to verify a date – just the thing itself, an apparently unremarkable ‘thing’, but undoubtedly fed by now silent or invisible past events.
The work in this exhibition reflects these ways of experiencing a place – fragmented, uncertain, obscure and confusing.