Abstract/Summary

The ongoing project Beyond the border. Signs of passages across the European borders by photographer Luca Prestia and sociolinguist Federico Faloppa looks at different European borders, or “borderscapes”, with the intention to observe those strips of land and collect and record traces of presences, passages, interactions: acts of resilience, resistance, and existence. It looks at these borderscapes without judging and without resorting to the usual categorisations that we are used to from the media’s common representation of the so-called “refugee problem”. The four borderscapes presented here are Ventimiglia, the last Italian town before the French border and the Côte d’Azur; the regions of Piedmont and Hautes-Alpes, also at the Italian-French border; Lesvos, the Greek island that has become a landing and stranding place for thousands of people on the move; and finally Bihać, a Bosnian town along the Balkan route close to the border with Croatia. The exhibition suggests an alternative way to look at the borderscapes as a crucible of humanity, to question those pictures, and question ourselves as viewers; and to see languages and multilingualism as a possible way to unseal cultural, if not geopolitical, borders.