Certain objects populate the majority of humanitarian settings. Tents, kits, jerrycans, or vouchers for food rations are humanitarian objects by design. But other objects, like a motorcycle resting under a porch, a drum in the corner of a room, or the emojis of a WhatsApp group, dwell unnoticed in humanitarian landscapes. These objects offer insights into the rhythms by which local humanitarians continue to care in spite of their precarity.
The situation of local humanitarians in Colombia is marked by abrupt withdrawals of humanitarian donors, dynamics of social abandonment, and rapidly shifting regional, national, and international migration policies. Colombia used to be a major destination and transit country for migrants heading north, with the most recent migration peak in 2021. Yet, since the beginning of 2025, the number of migrants in transit has drastically decreased due to the US and Panama’s migration policies and deportations. Local humanitarians are therefore today caught in an impasse, or in the words of Lauren Berlant, “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic.”1 This impasse is marked neither by exceptionality nor by spectacle, but rather by new contingencies brought about by loose erosions.
In this impasse, humanitarian life is characterized by a dual waiting. On the one hand, humanitarians “appear to be holding their breath, waiting, not for a pending catastrophic ‘event’ … but for a diffuse catastrophe that has already happened.”2 At some point, resources will stretch too thin and survival will no longer be possible if the situation does not change. On the other hand, their waiting is buoyed by optimism—a potential return of funding and international organizations, political and economic support, or the optimism of alternative strategies for survival that will lastingly ensure the continuity of the care they provide. The tension between these two waitings not only makes precariousness bearable, it also perpetuates it. It traps the humanitarians. Cruelty defines the waiting-scape of humanitarian impasse.
Local humanitarians live with this cruelty. They negotiate the tensions of dual waiting. They find ways to sustain their humanitarian care. They improvise, recompose and reinvent it, again and again. Accumulated failures and the fading of successive optimistic scenarios require renewed and repeated negotiations that each time reconfigure care. Mundane objects are crucial in the process. They channel desires and affective temporalities, helping humanitarians maintain footing in what Berlant terms “the new ordinaries.”3 They modulate it, setting its tonality and rhythm. These rhythms emerge as vital registers of endurance and adaptation. Less as linear progressions than as cyclical patterns of anticipation, frustration, and fleeting relief, these rhythms shape a humanitarian waiting that is not just a void but a temporal texture of resilience and improvisation for reinventing care.
The WhatsApp Group: A Placeholder of Presence and Speculative Care
In Necoclí, in the Gulf of Urabá, WhatsApp groups once formed the buzzing core of humanitarian coordination. Groups like Mesa Territorial de Salud (Territorial Health Roundtable) brought together local and international actors to share needs, updates, and locations. A staff member from the town hall recalls those early months of 2021 as “nonstop.” “I had to mute the phone just to sleep,” she recalls. “Even then, someone would always write at 3 am: a woman giving birth at the beach, a missing child, a truck arriving with rice and soap.”4 WhatsApp was not just a communication tool. It beat like a pulse through day and night, setting the tempo of urgency and response.
Even now, with some time having passed, this staff member still checks the WhatsApp group every morning, but the group has fallen increasingly silent. One by one, international NGO staff have left the town, following the next center of crisis as projects ended or funding dried up. The UNICEF officer who used to post health alerts has exited the group. So has the UNHCR protection lead. The last visible sign of institutional presence is the admin from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). “Even the coordinator left. I think she’s in Medellín now, or in Riohacha,” the staff member says with a shrug.
WhatsApp does more here than archive abandonment. The WhatsApp group functioned as a kind of informal logistics board, crisis line, and social glue all in one. Inside the town hall, the health department coordinator leans forward and smiles: “WhatsApp works. During the migration, it was very lively. Everyone knows who needs what and who is where.”5 She proudly emphasizes that it was not only about work. It was also about warmth, belonging, cariño. People sent updates, but also voice notes checking in late at night, photos of improvised shelters, jokes, or messages celebrating small victories like securing a mattress, or finding a missing relative. This loosely structured but affectively dense stream of emojis, voice notes, and images made solidarity tangible.
These digital assemblages are speculative and improvisational. For Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, care is “a matter of concern,” but also a speculative practice that sustains interdependence even when institutions withdraw.6 WhatsApp has become such a speculative interface. People continue to write, ask, respond. Not necessarily because it is effective, but because something might still happen, keeping alive the possibility of connection even amid uncertainty.
In these humanitarian waiting-scapes, where resources arrive irregularly, where funding waxes and wanes with international funding flows and geopolitical decisions, such informal technologies become affective temporal infrastructures. They manage not just tasks but moods. In the absence of stable calendars or institutional rhythms, the WhatsApp group creates its own temporality: alive with the buzz of incoming needs, reminders, and micro-coordination. Time stretches, punctuated by silence or sudden floods of information.
The group is rhythmic, but never regular, which makes it affectively powerful. It holds people in relation through repetition and interruption. Unlike the stable tempo of bureaucratic calendars, it operates through improvisation and attentiveness, and registers the pulsing of humanitarian time: the stop-and-go of funding cycles, the asynchronous urgency of local needs, the breathless tempo of coordination.
There is optimism in the group’s tone, often cruel in Berlant’s sense. People joke, improvise, mobilize. But behind the caring urgency lies the fragility of a system in which care is mediated by unstable connectivity and patchwork commitments. WhatsApp allows waiting to feel like action. You are not just waiting, you are “in the group”: you can react, respond, be seen. And yet, nothing may change. As Berlant notes, “Optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”7 The WhatsApp group, in this sense, becomes a speculative interface of care: not a promise, but a placeholder of presence. A line of connection that says: we are still here, even when everything else has moved on.
Perhaps this is what Puig de la Bellacasa means when she speaks of “thinking with care”: that we should not romanticize, but recognize how alternative temporalities of care emerge amid institutional withdrawal.8 The WhatsApp group is not just a communication tool. It is a temporal affective technology, a modest, improvisational infrastructure that does not solve structural abandonment, but which makes abandonment legible and shared.
El Furro: Glitches and Disruptions
Rostro Caraibe (Caribbean Face) is a local organization that coordinates activities connecting the many Venezuelans in Barranquilla to the city. Zulia, the Venezuelan region from which many of the migrants come, shares Barranquilla’s Caribbean culture. Darcy and Miguel, who run Rostro Caraibe, are themselves Venezuelans from Zulia. They have engaged in cultural community work since they arrived: photography, literature, religious holidays, food, and music. They detail the past projects of their organization and explain that they are developing new ones. However, the funding for organizations such as theirs has dwindled. USAID’s withdrawal is one reason but not the only one.
Miguel and Darcy have had to make adjustments to pay the rent at the end of the month.9 The apartment we are in serves as a home office. They teach as external professors on temporary contracts at local universities. They arrange events and courses. All this to fill the gaps. Something will come allowing them to resume their humanitarian work, they assert with hope. This is what they aim for. It is needed, perhaps even more than before. Venezuelan migration is no longer an emergency. Not even a crisis. Initiatives and support have ceased. The Venezuelans in Barranquilla are left to their own devices and without funding. Many do not fare well. Darcy and Miguel are waiting to resume their care work. They are preparing projects. They are planning ahead. Yet, the tensions between waiting for a better future to come and waiting for the disaster already past to catch up are pervasive. Talking about Rostro Caraibe is painful, but above all a positive bet on the future.
Darcy and Miguel seem trapped in an impasse-imposing transition. Their livelihood is at stake. So is their life project. However, even if they are in an impasse, they move around. Their waiting-scape is cruel, but it is not imposing immobility. The impasse of Miguel and Darcy has glitches that disturb and derange the pulsating rhythm of their tense situation. One glitch becomes apparent when Miguel points to a set of drums standing behind the computer desk. Miguel and Darcy explain that these drums are typical of the Caribbean region that unites Zulia and Atlántico of Colombia. They are used in the gaita zuliana, a Venezuelan folk music and dance.
The couple associates the drum specifically with the support network and festivities around “the Chinita,” the Virgin of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá. In front of the desk is a small altar dedicated to her. One of the drums is a furro. Its drum skin is perforated and a stick is moved up and down to make sound. Miguel gets up to demonstrate how a furro is played and how it sounds. Darcy shows Instagram videos where Miguel is playing and she is singing. They laugh, joke, and speed up the talk. The impasse is still there, obviously. But its quality has changed. The drum makes a glitch, “a disturbance in the situation of the present” that invites “improvisations and adaptations.”10
More than a glitch, the furro marks a rhythm, disrupting the pulsating tensions at the core of their cruel waiting-scape. One can think of the drum as what Sarah Ahmed calls a “happy object.”11 When Darcy and Miguel relate to the drum, their mood changes. They are proud of the community formed to the beat of the furro. Its sociability is of value to them. They take pleasure in recounting the events and festivities where they have played. They emphasize that the furro attracts Venezuelans and Colombians alike. It has “contagious” qualities.12 It also connects generations. It is a cultural heritage shared with future generations to be carried forward. As the beat resonates across time and space, it affirms and deepens the connective affinities between Miguel, Darcy, Rostro Caraibe, and their community.
The furro “accumulates positive value” through circulation, as do other happy objects.13 Its widening reach amplifies and intensifies its beat. It becomes more insistent, difficult to ignore. This matters. The disruption of rhythm recalls and reconnects Miguel and Darcy to a world beyond their current impasse. It opens on a world beyond the cruel waiting-scape. More than a glitch, inviting improvisation, the furro is creating disruptions that open space for more radical reconfigurations of care.
When Darcy and Miguel speak about the furro, it is easy to see the drum as a “cluster of promises” made of glitches and disruptions, through which “waiting acquires a sense of meaning or purpose and can be endured, as it points toward something.”14 More than waiting endured, standing in the corner by the computer, the furro is a constant presence disturbing the cruelty of waiting. A haunting image of an off-beat rhythm breaking out of its grip, the furro is a standing, open invitation to action beyond the impasse. The beats are pointers, political pointers, to alternative futures that can be pursued in the glitches and disruptions of the humanitarian waiting-scape.
Motorbikes: Cyborgs of Promises and Shared Waiting
Motorbikes are everywhere in the village of Acandí. On sidewalks, under porches, sometimes parked inside living rooms between the dining table and the sofa. A motorbike is a valuable asset; when migrants began arriving from Cuba and Haiti a few years ago, and more recently from Venezuela, villagers invested heavily in motorbikes, to transport them from the pier to the entry of the Darién jungle, the crossing point to Panama.
These motorbikes became objects of promise. When purchased, they embodied a promise of some economic stability in a region marked by social and economic abandonment.15 They were a way to adapt to the state of precarity in northern Chocó, a predominantly Indigenous and Afro-descendant area separated from the rest of the country by the Gulf of Urabá, the armed group controlling it, and lingering traces of racism.
Until recently, inhabitants’ lives were marked by the rhythms of small boats arriving with migrants heading north. The motorcycles were liberating. The income they generated allowed for some projection into the future, some horizons, from being able to know what one would eat the next day to projects of buying small plots or financing searches for missed relatives. But they were also oppressive, tied to constraining temporalities.
The boats’ arrival and departure times were not fixed, but depended instead on sea conditions and the number of migrants who had gathered enough money to pay the tickets. As a result, the inhabitants of Acandí lived in contingent timing. Their hours of rest, meals, and other activities were partly subordinate to the key moment of boat arrival. Multiple rhythms intersected then: the rhythms of the sea, the material rhythms of the motorbikes themselves (including the time to refuel or to queue for tire reparation), and bodily rhythms when the drivers needed to rest. To navigate this contingent timing, marked by micro-waits when these cycles were out of sync, motorbike drivers developed forms of attunement to detect “anticipatory signals, or clues to guide the timing of one’s actions.”16 For instance, the sonic environment of these waiting-scapes provided crucial anticipatory signals. The chug of the boat motors meant that one had to start up the engine and head to the pier.
Yet, since northward migration slowed down at the beginning of 2025, revenue streams have dried up; Acandí has experienced a kind of suspension where potential futures have become an enigma. Now, there is almost no one left to transport. There is a too-muchness of time. In this impasse, people are trying to recalibrate. As time refuses to move forward, they hold on to optimism: “We are waiting for Trump’s term to end… It would give migrants more hope, and they will return.” says one of the motorbike drivers.17 An optimism oriented toward the return of others’ optimism, in a way.
In the meantime, motorbikes remain affective objects, as evidenced by the acts of care directed toward them: they are decorated with stickers and regularly washed, even if they rarely travel. They continue to mark the landscape and foster connections. As a result, Acandí feels populated by cyborgs; half-human, half-motorbike. At the pier, there is always a group of about ten men waiting, seated on their machines, ready to take anyone anywhere. Though it rarely happens, the pier remains an important site of social grounding as people chat and banter with each other. But often, no one says anything. They simply share this elongated present. Continuing to go to the pier together constitutes durational practices of staying, which is also a way of maintaining rhythm in their day.
In the evenings, when the power outages do not interfere, some take online training courses to develop their digital skills. The cruelty of the situation lies in the fact that these online training certificates pile up, while job opportunities remain utterly nonexistent. In the evenings, people also play bingo or other lottery-like betting games such as Super Giro. They punctuate village life: games with stakes of varying amounts that bring a bit of adrenaline before the announcement of the winning numbers. At the same time, they are creating a reassuring routine where everyone knows their place around the plastic tables brought out for the occasion. And the motorbikes rest, never far from the players.
Conclusion
In the (post)-humanitarian settings of Colombia, non-humanitarian objects help negotiate the violence of the impasse. WhatsApp groups maintain a speculative presence and preserve affective relationships and improvisations. A furro becomes an object of happiness. Motorbikes embody both economic promises and dynamics of everyday synchronization and time-sharing.At stake here are practices of dusting—literally, preventing dust from accumulating on these objects. Even when one might expect them to remain at rest, quiet gestures of maintenance keep them from disappearing entirely.18 The WhatsApp group no longer serves its initial purpose of emergency coordination. The motorbikes no longer transport migrants to the last humanitarian settlement before the jungle. The drum is played in spite of the eviction that looms at the end of every month.
Adjusting to situations of waiting is profoundly political. These mundane objects highlight how the shift from a lack to a surplus of time represents precarious situations beyond the control of those who endure them. Indeed, they trace how one form of time poverty transforms into another. The practices of dusting while lives are on hold unfold in a minor tone: preserving, persisting, staying.19 This is a temporality of maintenance, distinct from that of development.20 These practices, however, remain no less courageous and earnest.
Across these situations, the idea of repetition is significant. Repetition contains the possibility of renewal. Indeed, the rhythms accompanying the animation of these objects go beyond recurring motifs and are constituted as much by repetition as by difference and variation.21 In this vein, for Édouard Glissant, “rhythm is a ritual force, as well as a lever of consciousness,” particularly in a Caribbean context where collective phenomenology and memory have been marked by both discontinuity and a continuity of identity reinvention and cultural reinterpretation.22
While rhythms contribute to the social and cognitive fabric of life in the Caribbean, these dynamics might speak to broader post-humanitarian or precarious settings.23 The chirp of a WhatsApp notification, the beat of a drum, the purr of a motor engine: these ritournelles, these open refrains help negotiate the violence of everyday small destructions. They help make the situation less bad. They linger in ambivalence as they sustain a cruel attachment to dominant and dysfunctional systems that perpetuate violent social and economic dependencies, and with them, diminish welfare and a sense of control over futures. Thus, the rituals around these objects maintain a connection to humanitarian times. They keep hope alive. At the same time, the dusting of these objects is an intervention, one which raises the temporality of preservation beyond that of humanitarian and state resource dependency. In these ambivalent situations of cruelty and preservation, the chirp, the beat, and the purr transform waiting into a form of care.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 7.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 54.
Conversation on June 4, 2025.
Conversation on June 4, 2025.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Conversation on March 12, 2025.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 198-199.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 18.
Anna Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2008): 130–45.
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 29.
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 30, fn. 21.
João Biehl and Peter Andrew Locke, Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Kevin K. Birth, Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, Culture, Mind, and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 110.
Conversation on March 22, 2025.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 1969.
Baraitser, Enduring Time, 47–68.
Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto”.
In the words of Henri Lefebvre, “there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference”. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004). Originally published 1992, 6.
Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 222. Donna J. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Birth, Objects of Time, 105–6.