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.

Staging Ground: Infrastructures, Performance, and Bodies in Movement published by Theatrum Mundi and dpr-barcelona, assembles their on-site investigations, critical reflections, and performance scores offering new ways to think, make, and inhabit mobility infrastructures. Accompanying their work, four commissioned essays and a photo series frame the urgency of new tools able to bridge infrastructural and bodily scales, and reflect on the learnings offered by the residency projects. A design concept by Athens-based practice Typical Organization draws on and subverts the visual language of the French road sign system.

It is accompanied by the staging.city website hosting films, maps, and soundscapes that test performative approaches to rest, commoning, ecology, informal movement, and symbolic power, as they materialise in the infrastructural landscapes of the Périphérique ring-road and new Grand Paris Express metro system.