Staging Ground

Staging Ground is a platform for performative responses to urban challenges. The 2023 cycle ""Acts of Crossing"" invites emerging practitioners to develop critical documentations of the mobility injustices created by Paris' Périphérique ring road, and creative strategies for new ways to cross the barrier it creates between Paris and its suburbs. 

The residency takes place in two stages in spring: a research week including a programme of walks and discussions bringing visiting LINA fellows into contact with local artists, urbanists, and active citizens; and a second production week including a public presentation of work in progress. In autumn, the outcomes of the fellows' work will be published on a dedicated project website in the form of film, sound, and cartography, offering creative strategies for new acts of crossing back to the territories they have explored.

Staging Ground is an activation of the ideas developed within Movement Forum, Theatrum Mundi's 2021 programme of experimental laboratories in London, Paris and Lisbon, as part of Future Architecture Platform, exploring movement practices in response to mobility injustices of gender, sexuality, age, and ecology. Encounters, the publication resulting from this exploration of movement practice, acts as a handbook informing the fellows' research.

Collaboration with LINA fellows

LINA fellows will take part in two week-long residencies in Paris. 

The first includes a programme of walks, readings, screenings and discussions, immersing them in the territories of the north of Paris and the inner northern suburbs, the focus of 2024's Olympics and of attempts to reconnect Paris with its peripheries, but also in choreographic and performative practices. They will hear from local experts and practitioners including Alexandra Lacroix (opera director), Julien Sneck (head of ecological transition, Plaine Commune), Dimitri Szuter (urbanist and performer). They will also be mentored through the research and production process by Fani Kostourou (urbanist, Grimshaw Architects), Ghassan Salameh (design curator and researcher), Magda Maaoui (urbanist, APUR), and Lamyne M (performer). 

During the second week, fellows will test and document their own 'acts of crossing' the ring road, whether these be from the perspective of human or non-human life, sound or movement, alone or with local communities. They will present their work in progress in a public event alongside responses from mentors and screenings of films from Theatrum Mundi's previous research on these topics. 

Fellows will receive travel grants, fees, and production budgets, enabling them each to produce a new piece of audio-visual and/or cartographic work documenting or imagining a crossing of the Périphérique. These will be launched together on a new online platform in autumn. All residents and mentors from across two years of residencies will be invited to contribute to a book published in 2025.