PASSING BY
Walking through desire, death, and dreams — side by side with a stranger.
Paris, 2022
Roles: Co-Creator, Artistic Director, Experience Designer
Collaborator: Alice Cabaret, Urban Strategist, Founder of The Street Society
DESCRIPTIONPassing By is a human and urban walking experience co-created by experience designer Isabella Nardini and urban strategist Alice Cabaret.
Set in Paris, it invited 30 strangers to connect with each other and with the city through an intentional two-hour walk structured around three existential themes: Desire, Death, and Dreams.
Participants walked in pairs through three distinct urban spaces — Pigalle Boulevard (Desire), Montmartre Cemetery (Death), and Abbesses (Dreams) — using rituals and intimate questions to explore human presence, vulnerability, and urban affection.
Created in collaboration with The Street Society and inspired by the concept "Butterfly in Your Path" by Nardini, Passing By transformed unloved urban spaces into stages for unprecedented connections and collective memory.
EXPERIENCE DYNAMICSPassing By explored how human connection can re-enchant forgotten or stigmatised parts of a city. Participants — a mix of Parisians and visitors — were matched in pairs for each section of the walk, each time with a new stranger. The journey unfolded through three phases:
Desire: Walking silently for the first 50 steps down Pigalle Boulevard, surrounded by sex shops and cabarets, before breaking the silence with questions like:
"What makes you desirable?"
"Do you desire the impossible?"Death: Holding hands while walking through Montmartre Cemetery, confronting vulnerability with questions like:
"Who do you love the most?"
"Do you feel truly alive?"Dreams: Gazing into each other's eyes for one minute before walking through Abbesses, sharing questions like:
"How could I help you make your biggest dream come true?"
"Do you often walk on the boulevard of broken dreams?"
URBAN AND SOCIAL IMPACTPassing By questioned how cities segregate or connect people — and how new rituals can turn unloved or unnoticed spaces into stages for affection, presence, and memory. It demonstrated how shared urban rituals can foster emotional connection across difference: tourists and Parisians, strangers of all backgrounds, side by side.
The experience also reflected on gentrification, emotional geography, conscious tourism, and urban resilience, proposing that reclaiming the city together begins by walking, witnessing, and risking new connections.
Some participants experienced solidarity through vulnerability: for example, a straight man reflecting on LGBTQ+ public affection by holding hands in a cemetery, and others forming lasting cross-cultural friendships that shaped their future paths.
ARTISTIC REFLECTIONPassing By revealed to me how creating experiences in uncontrolled public environments transforms both the participants and the city itself.
By surrendering control and letting ourselves be affected by the unpredictable flows of the street — its noise, its passersby, its invisible choreography — we also opened ourselves to affect the city in a subtle, almost invisible way.
At certain moments, the walk through Paris — holding hands in a cemetery, gazing silently in the streets — felt less like an organized event and more like a living, moving ritual:
a procession,
a silent manifestation of presence,
an ephemeral emotional landscape woven into the city.
Inspired by practices like Laurent Buffet’s Itinérances, l'art en replacement, I came to understand that walking is not only movement through space — it is an act of quiet artistic re-inscription, a way of gently transforming cities and selves.
In this way, Passing By became not just a human connection experience, but a moving, ephemeral artwork, shaped by presence, chance, vulnerability — and the infinite unfolding of public life.
