Between Here and There

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a mapmaker might leave a blank space on a parchment where the terrain was unknown, marking it simply with the warning that beyond this point, there be dragons. We have largely outgrown the dragons, replacing them with concrete pillars and the relentless hum of transit. Yet, the feeling of being in-between remains. We spend so much of our lives in the transit zones—the waiting rooms, the train platforms, the stretches of road that exist only to get us to the place where life supposedly happens. We treat these spaces as voids, as time stolen from us, rather than as the very marrow of our days. There is a strange, quiet dignity in the way a structure holds the weight of our movement, standing firm while we rush beneath it, indifferent to our hurry. If we stopped to look, would we find that the journey is not merely the path, but the architecture of the waiting itself? What happens to the soul when it is suspended in the space between departure and arrival?

Rishika Sahgal has captured this suspended stillness in her work titled The Bridge. It invites us to pause in the middle of the rush and consider the architecture of our own daily transitions. Does it make you wonder what lies on the other side of the crossing?