Staging Ground

“Staging Ground: infrastructure, performance, and bodies in movement” is a publication we designed for Theatrum Mundi published with Dpr Barcelona edited by John Bingham-Hall with a beautiful body of investigations, critical reflections, and performance scores offering new ways to think, make, and inhabit mobility infrastructures. Our design, gently hijacking the French road-sign system, could be resumed with the catch phrase: “No sign is Neutral”.

The fact we also contributed with a writing piece to the publication discussing the design process seems to embody again that very idea that infrastuctors are not just neural surfaces that need to work but possibilities to think. Herby an excerpt of our text:

Peripheral notes on (de)sign
By Typical Organization for Standards and Order

Giving shape to the graphic infrastructure of the Staging Ground research platform debuting with its online presence and ending with this very book, started with an intuitive reevaluation the graphic vocabulary of the french road sign system.

The French asphalt jungle is punctuated with a rather peculiar typeface family with a typical name: Caractères. The fact that the genesis of those faces remain, as far as we can trace, hidden in a faceless anonima is rather revealing. The letters, that have apparently officially dominated the French road network since 1946, seem to have bubbled up from the obscure subconscious of the French Ministry of Transport. We would like to believe that we stand here in-front of a genuine collective artefact shaped by countless unknown hands and minds. While aiming for functionality Caractères do embody hidden strata of a phycological backdrop that is very different from for example the British, German or Swiss road signs systems. We surly could make uncanny assumptions by comparing the inherent convictions of such systems however dry and rational those may look.

Next to the publication we designed a website allowing interactive materials to be hosted: www.staging.city

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.