1170 | manual juliol 2 | From the mountain to the sea. A performative essay on threshold and trespasses

“We used to go to the woods [on the border] to pick lilies of the valley in the night, after working in the shirt factory. We did it to supplement the salary. The flowers were to be sold in inner Switzerland”, recounted some women employed in a Swiss factory near the border with Italy that has existed for more than one century. Here, the majority of workers have always been Italian frontaliere, cross-border workers who commute across that line every day. In their recount, the presence of the border in the woods disappears.
This is one of the stories of border crossings that would be presented in a performative essay combining an oral narration with a projection of photographic materials. The essay takes as its starting point the invisibility of the Swiss Italian border and elaborates on how it exists as a borderscape performatively reproduced by the bodily crossings associated with cross-border work and migration between the two regions of Lombardy and Ticino.
Combining archival images and photographs taken on the field, with information coming from news media and first-hand interviews, this visual and verbal narrative would interweave different stories of displacement: from that of the train journeys of female workers commuting across the border every day, to the walks of migrants moving through the borders woods with the light of dawn.
While the Alps are an identitary space in national narratives, the woods on their slopes are also a space of resistance to the divisions imposed by administrative lines, where firefly lights still appear. Photographs remain as traces of these presences, opening up to new spaces of imagination.

Nicoletta Grillo
KU Leuven

ID Abstract: manual juliol 2