Staging Ground Residency _ Harrison
Residency Programme
Each year, the Staging Ground residency program invites LINA fellows and other participants to conduct on-site research and develop creative projects related to major urban transformations occurring in the Greater Paris metropolitan area. The first cycle of residency Acts of Crossing (2023) focused on the question of urban mobility in the context of the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road encircling Paris. The resulting projects from the residents took the form of workshops, a video essay, and a performance, highlighting how performative thinking can help imagine transitions in cultures of urban movement.
LINA Fellow Melissa Harrison
The second cycle of the Staging Ground residency programme was divided in two parts. For the first part (2 to 3 May 2024), Theatrum Mundi invited Berlin-based researcher and practitioner Melissa Harrison to conduct a movement workshop with students of the Master ArTeC. The aim of the workshop was to approach the politics of movement in cities from a choreographic and psychosomatic perspective.
Melissa Harrison developed a handbook of scores titled "Common Sense | Common Space: (E)merging (Data) Sensing Bodies" to serve as the basis for the movement workshop with the students. The handbook offers a framework that "utilizes somatic and choreographic practices as invitations to explore an immersive ethnography of the senses and bodily capacities in and across urban space". It "aims to stimulate questions regarding social, spatial, and ecological justice while gesturing towards embodied and collective experiences of post-human commoning in the city, across differences, towards care-full futures".
Caption: Handbook of scores titled Common Sense | Common Space: (E)merging (Data) Sensing Bodies designed by Melissa Harrison in the framework of the Staging Ground residency.
Caption: Students from the Master ArTeC take part in Melissa Harrison's movement workshop as part of the Staging Ground residency. Photo: Daniel Mebarek.
