This collection includes the titles – Navigations, Encounters and Embodying Otherness. 

Discover our research conducted over the few years focused on the topic of choreographing the city . Navigations explores a transdisciplinary lexicon of Place-making: a scaffolding for shared exploration, liberating communication from the contingencies and limitations of different subject areas. Encounters addresses questions in the design of urban (im)mobilities, voicing the choreographers, dancers, architects, and urbanists that contributed to the Movement Forum project. Embodying Otherness explores the presence, stillness and movement of bodies in the city, and the ways they are constantly restricted, codified and practiced.

If we think of the public-facing cultural sites largely aimed at national and international tourists and visitors, such as monuments, muse­ums, galleries and theatres, where culture is consumed and displayed as the ‘urban stage’, then its behind-the-scenes counterpart is the ‘urban back­stage’, which includes both the hidden spaces where cultural production, experimentation and rehearsals take place and the underlying conditions that underpin these activities. The urban backstage is made up of invisible networks, relationships and labour that exist out of public view in our cities, producing ‘everyday cultures’ which are vital in fostering and cultivating a shared cultural identity and belonging in our urban spaces.

Reaching across four different cities, London, Glasgow, Paris and Marseille, this collection of essays and drawings aims to amplify the voices, stories and experiences of artists, performers, makers, designers, craftspeople, fabricators, cafe owners and those running small businesses that support cultural production locally. We present these as seeds of ideas towards making and sustaining shared forms of cultural life ­where the image of the city emerges from the activity and cultural expressions of its inhabitants rather than being imposed by national, regional, citywide, or local policies and plans developed by public and private bodies and authorities.

Edited by Cecily Chua, Labeja Kodua Okullu and Marta Michalowska

Contributors: Andrea Cetrulo/ Cecily Chua/ Elahe Karimnia/ Fani Kostourou/ John Bingham-Hall/ Richard Sennett.

There are cities that are walking cities or driving cities; there are quiet, loud, fast, slow, broad or high cities, and the bodies within them are shaped by the need to navigate them, while that process of navigation, in turn, shapes the cities. Urban designers, engineers, architects, exhibition curators and choreographers share a common interest in creating movement around, in, and through places.

Each of these disciplines comes with its own language, verbal and/or somatic: a structured system of words, ideas, movements, rules, meanings and assumptions that can lead to slippages or ‘failures’ in communication outside the narrow field of their specialisms. And those instances of slippages have provided the starting point for dancer, choreographer and Theatrum Mundi’s Research Fellow Adesola Akinleye to define a transdisciplinary lexicon of Place-making: a scaffolding for shared exploration, liberating communication from the contingencies and limitations of different subject areas.

Edited by Marta Michalowska

Site Report is a collection of poetry in prose, verse and screenplay, where windows are a lot more than panes of glass, tables have minds of their own and sinks are conduits that connect to the wider world beyond the home. It is not a book about the domestic: it is the domestic reimagined. Written through the architecture of the home and together with all its elements, it is an invitation into the worlds of windows, tables and sinks that should never be reduced to their mere objecthood.

Developed and written during Rhona Warwick Paterson’s fellowship at Theatrum Mundi (2020-22), Site Report is an imaginative re-worlding of domestic space that destabilises the most intimate and familiar of spaces, proposing a pulsating landscape with uncontained possibility. 

Edited by Marta Michalowska

This collection includes the titles – It’s a Work in Progress, Performing Projections and Infrastructuring. 

Discover our research conducted over the last two years focused on the topic of cultural infrastructure. It’s a Work in Progress explores different models of infrastructure for cultural production through spatial and network analysis, to understand how to design and run these spaces. Performing Projections looks at the ways performance-making can be used as a craft for architectural thinking. Infrastructuring considers the relationship between cultural institutions and cultural infrastructures through four dialogues with practitioners working in these fields. 

This collection is including the Sonic Urbanism series with the titles – Sonic Urbanism: Resonances in a New Field, Sonic Urbanism: The Political Voice and Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life.

In this edition, contributors listen to the cacophony of human noise to hear the voices of non-human agents. From parrots and pigeons to crystals and electrical substations, the complex depth and variety of city soundscapes reveal new ways to understand life among urban ecologies. The physical publication comes with a parallel digital publication that can be read, heard and watched at sonic.city. 

Contributors: John Bingham-Hall/ Gascia Ouzounian / Nicola Di Croce/ Melissa Van Drie/ Nuno da Luz/ Ahmed bin Shabib/ Rashid bin Shabib/ Sepideh Karami/ Elahe Karimnia/ Matt Parker/ Juan-Guillermo Dumay/ Ruth Oldham/ Tsouknida Eirini/ Tasos Varoudis/ Roberto Botazzi/ Sara Rodrigues/ Nastassja Simensky/ Maria Dominguez/ Anjali Nair/ Hannah Rose Fox/ Miriam Young/ Natasha Nicholson/ Matilde Meireles/ Seetal Solanki/ Monai de Paula Antunes/ Plant Wave/ Tushar Hathiramani/ Streetlights Collective/ Niko de Paula Lefort.

Often we only become aware of infrastructure when it is broken.

When infrastructure’s functioning is broken, as users, protagonists, friends, interlocutors, we are required to find an alternative way to travel, to consume, to rest, to socialise, to acknowledge that, for many in urban contexts, this corruption marks a seam, or an edge, in an otherwise seamless, or edgeless, cultural life. 

This publication by Susannah Haslam explores the relationship between cultural institutions and cultural infrastructures through four dialogues with cultural practitioners: eco-anxious artist, environmentalist and fermenter Sean Roy Parker; curator, educator, agitator and resource builder Cecilia Wee; curator and cultural programmer across design and architecture Meneesha Kellay; and co-directors of Theatrum Mundi – curator, producer and writer Marta Michalowska and cities researcher, organiser and musician John Bingham-Hall.

Edited by Marta Michalowska and Lou-Atessa Marcellin

Contributors: Sean Roy Parker/ Cecilia Wee/ Meneesha Kellay/ Marta Michalowska/ John Bingham-Hall.

Embodying Otherness explores the presence, stillness and movement of bodies in the city, and the ways they are constantly restricted, codified and practiced. How can we challenge codes embedded in urban design which limit our right to be and move in the city? And how can we accommodate future changes by navigating the unknown and imagining alternative realities?

Edited by Elahe Karimnia and Fani Kostourou

Contributors: Adesola Akinleye/ Andrea Cetrulo/ Blanca Pujals/ Cecily Chua/ Elahe Karimnia/ Ellie Cosgrave/ Fani Kostourou/ Giuditta Vendrame/ John Bingham-Hall/ Lisa Sandlos/ Luke Gregory-Jones/ Marcos Villalba/ Matthias Sperling/ Paolo Patelli/ Paul Setúbal/ Pepa Ubera/ Rebecca Faulkner/ Rennie Tang/ Richard Sennett.

Performing Projections explores the two-year collaboration between Theatrum Mundi and Jayden Ali, Unit Leader of the Spatial Practices programme at Central Saint Martins. Combining the voices of students, educators, and practitioners the publication is centred around one fundamental question: Can performance-making be a craft for architectural thinking? The studio was an experimental testbed where methodologies were developed using the techniques of scoring, staging, rehearsing, and improvising to raise provocative questions about who has the right to access, occupy, use, and remake our urban environments.

Edited by Cecily Chua and Jayden Ali

Contributors: Abby Bird/ Andrea Cetrulo/ Andrea Luka Zimmerman/ Andreas Lang/ Annie Dermawan/ Awais Ali/ Callum Brown/ Cameron Bray/ Cecily Chua/ Dhara Bhatt/ Elahe Karimnia/ Jake Johnson/ Jayden Ali/ John Bingham-Hall/ Kleanthis Kyriakou/ Lydia Hyde/ Mollie Griffiths/ Olivia Sutherill/ Rebecca Faulkner/ Sara Lohse / Yibeijia Li.