Walking is never a solitary experience. We are always walking with something or someone. Each act of walking is a mode of plurality that generates multiple assemblages, shaping and reconfiguring our ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. Within this dynamic interplay, infrastructures of mobility are more than material or physical structures that merely enable, mediate, or at times constrain pedestrian movement. They function as contact zones, where the embodied practices of the walkers encounter the more-than-human agencies and materialities of infrastructures. In this encounter, infrastructures may become loci of sociability and exchange, of imagination and narration. At times, they even become fellow travelers, silent companions along the path.

 

Through movement, the walking body co-produces with and through infrastructures a network of social relations; projects imaginaries of possible futures; envisions reachable destinations; reinscribes memories of past trajectories; and traces lines in the landscape that unfold into plotlines of stories yet to be told. On the threshold seeks to gather such stories, staging an (im)possible dialogue with a mobility infrastructure. Walking with the Northern Ring Road of Padua, a city in Northeastern Italy a more-than-human conversation between a human and infrastructural body takes place, step by step, photo after photo. On the threshold creatively experiments with photography, infrastructural storytelling and it-narration as a way to inhabit the entangled relationships between infrastructures and human bodies, where objects and subjects of research blur into porous boundaries. In this journey, the ring road is more than an object of observation, it is a travel companion, an im/mobile subject with its own agency, shaping detours, moods, and imaginations. Walking with the ring road instead of along it means attuning the movements of the human body, of the observer, to the rhythms and material realities of the more-than-human body of the infrastructure, the observed.  The pillars are motionless legs that trace the path; but also traversable boundaries, columns that support a concrete temple where, day after day, the ritual of commuting is celebrated. The underpasses are thresholds that allow access to an everyday beyond, a doorway to other lives, on the boundary between city and non-city.

 

Like pilgrims, we carry our vows, gathering fragments of the sacred in a suspended landscape, between public and private, between urban and peri-urban. And we all move together. Those on this side, those on the other, those above and those below, those who hit the accelerator, honk the horn, and drive away, those who remain stuck, lined up, angry, frustrated. Those who chase dreams, who reach their loved ones, who move house and those who return, those who leave and those who are gone. Those who drive and those who are driven, those who walk.