Staging Ground: infrastructure, performance, and bodies in movement

Available to order from dpr-barcelona.

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. 

Their films, soundscapes, and scores—presented across the Staging Ground book and accompanying staging.city website—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. 

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.

Edited and curated by John Bingham-Hall / Designed by Typical Organization for Standards and Order / Contributions from Magda Maaoui, Daniel Mebarek, Jonathan Steiger, Myrto Delimichali, Studio Inscape, Rubble, Ewa Effiom, Margarida Waco, Mai Linh Guinet-Brigitte, gel office, Neo-futuristic Walks, Dimitri Szuter, Melissa Harrison, John Bingham-Hall / Published jointly by Theatrum Mundi and dpr-barcelona as part of the LINA European Architecture Programme, co-financed by the European Union / Launched on October 4 at the Irish Architecture Foundation, with a screening of research films by Jonathan Steiger and Myrto Delimichali, and discussion between editor John Bingham-Hall and contributors Nicolas Howden and Emily Jones of architecture collective Rubble / Presented at Offprint Book Fair, Paris, from November 13–16.