Thresholds and Trespasses. An Embodied Exploration of Borders’ Imaginaries

Abstract

The national boundary line that separates Italy and Switzerland is today highly dematerialised and mostly invisible. Yet it continues to exist as a “borderscape,” reproduced by a series of crossing practices such as crossborder work and migration, and by their associated imaginaries. Based on oral history, photography, and performative walks, this essay gives a first-person account of how this border is kept alive or contested by those practices that routinely cross it. The starting point is the story of women workers employed in a manufacturing factory in the border area who used to go to the border woods to harvest flowers. Moving between border factories, workers’ parking lots, migratory trajectories, and smuggling routes, the essay tests on the ground the notion of a borderscape at the interception of experiences and representations.