Staging Ground: infrastructure, performance, and bodies in movement

Climate breakdown, environmental justice, urban expansion, metropolitanisation. A multiplicity of dynamics are driving rapid infrastructural transitions, transforming cultures of movement. But these changes 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: infrastructures, performance, and bodies in movement assembles on-site investigations, critical reflections, and performance scores offering new ways to think, make, and inhabit mobility infrastructures. Grounded in the metropole of Grand Paris, they aim to offer strategies to be staged anywhere that infrastructural transformations are shifting urban grounds.

The book edited by John Bingham-Hall stems from a residency programme hosted by Theatrum Mundi in Grand Paris as part of the LINA European Architecture Programme. From 2023 to 2025, it invited six LINA fellows—emerging spatial practitioners and artists – to move and think in the changing landscapes of north-eastern Paris and Plaine Commune.