Climate breakdown, environmental justice, urban expansion, metropolitanisation. A multiplicity of dynamics are driving rapid infrastructural transitions, transforming cultures of movement, both human and non-human. But these transformations are all-too-often narrated at scales that surpass the embodied experiences of those that live them every day. To better understand the bodily and cultural implications of these transformations, we can learn from the crafts of the stage–choreography, sound, narrative, dramaturgy.
Staging Ground was a three-year process of experimentation that aimed to do exactly this. Two residencies, in 2023 and 2024, invited five fellows of the LINA European Architecture Platform, to come to Grand Paris to investigate infrastructural transformations in their relation to bodies and cultures of mobility. Together, each residency group, whose practices span dance, film, architecture, and urban theory, followed a week-long curriculum including walks, on-site experiments, and meetings with local planners and activists, immersing them critically and sensorially in questions raised by new and changing landscapes of transport infrastructure in the metropole. A further two fellows developed collective experiments with students of the Master ArTeC.
This website accompanies the book Staging Ground: infrastructure, performance, and bodies in movement, edited by John Bingham-Hall and published by Theatrum Mundi and dpr-barcelona. The book is available to order here.
Edited and curated by John Bingham-Hall
Designed by Typical Organization for Standards and Order
Coordinated by Daniel Mebarek
Co-financed by the European Union
