Borderlands/ (2015) is a work created for the Urban Multimedia Festival ‘In/VisibleCities’ held in the adjoining cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica. These are Cities that sit on either side of the Italian-Slovenia border. It is a border now marked by a simple metallic plaque embedded into a pavement, across which the inhabitants of two countries belonging to the ‘Schengen Zone; of the European Economic Union can easily flow. However it was at one time a point on the heavily fortified barrier between the so-called ‘East’ and ‘West’. Between the Capitalist state of Italy, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
To casually step over the memorialised final traces of this one time point of ideological and military rupture, is to bring home how fluidic, transient, constructed and ephemeral the concept of the ‘Border’ can be. This video work takes this as a starting point to explore notions of the mapping, construction, fortification, relocation and erasure of borders in the face of evolving histories of conflict, human migration, settlement and dispersal.