The cultural border: a place of hybridisation and dialogue
By Marco Aime
Every action we take occurs within spatial and temporal coordinates. Just as we have imposed order on time by breaking it into recognisable segments, we have likewise tried to give a meaning of “our own” to space, by closing it off and separating it from something that thereby becomes “other”. To do this, to classify it, we must “cut it out” from the whole, draw a line – real or imaginary – that delimits it: this is the border. The Italian word confine, in fact, derives from the Latin cum finis, the place where things end.
At this point the question seems unavoidable: what is it that ends? Often it is the idea we hold of ourselves as a social group, an idea that does not necessarily correspond to reality and that in most cases is the product of a narrative, if not of outright manipulation or the “invention of tradition”. Georg Simmel, one of the founding fathers of sociology, compares the border to the frame of a work of art: it functions to delimit the work, “cutting it out” from the ordinary world and making it unique. How truly coherent a community (of any type or size) actually is internally, is a rather delicate question, and by no means a given one. In fact, a community often comes into being more from the desire of some to found it and the will of many to belong to it than from any “real” basis grounded in shared elements.
As Ambrose Bierce sarcastically wrote in his The Devil’s Dictionary, a frontier is: “in political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other”.
Once drawn, however, borders take on such significance that they shape the thinking of those who recognise them. In this way, borders become symbolic receptacles filled with the meanings that members of a community attribute to them and perceive within them. They help make whatever they circumscribe appear more unified, and at the same time they encourage the belief that whatever lies outside is inevitably different. In doing so, they reinforce senses of homogeneity and continuity, and therefore of identity. Indeed, any community that lacks an external actor to recognise or confront it would have no further reason to exist. Drawing a border thus becomes a way of securing one’s own space in which to establish one’s own rules, to assert the recognition of a difference, to mark the site of a distinction, real or presumed.
We often hear the terms “border” and “frontier” used interchangeably, even in official communications. This terminological overlap is common across other languages as well. These are two distinct dimensions, both in form and in meaning. The word “border” tends to occupy a semantic field that translates into a sharp line dividing two spaces. Its archetypal embodiment is a furrow dug into the earth: think of the one Romulus drew to separate “his” territory, on which would rise the city destined to become the Urbe par excellence.
The word “frontier”, by contrast, does not evoke a sharp line but rather a strip of territory that is not yet properly defined and is in constant evolution. If a border tends to indicate a separation between contiguous spaces, the frontier embodies the “end of the earth”, the space into which one ventures. Think of the saga of the Far West, celebrated by an enormous body of film. The geographical imaginary of the frontier has played out in several cases in which Western conquerors looked out onto vast territorial expanses previously unexplored by European populations.
Another territorial domain that gave rise to a frontier myth, this time understood as an “internal” frontier relative to coastal settlements, was Australia and its outback: the interior continental desert that extends across most of the nation’s territory and was progressively colonised by Europeans.
The border, then, separates two spaces more sharply than the frontier does. The frontier operates in a more dynamic way: it is the space where one confronts or clashes with the other. A border can block passage; a frontier regulates it.
The birth of the idea of the territorial border as we conceive of it today can be traced back to 1648, following the Peace of Westphalia, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. That historical moment marks the starting point, on European soil, of the absolute state properly speaking, characterised by the mutual recognition of sovereign and independent authorities. At the end of the classical period, in the fourth century, what the Romans called the limes had in fact disappeared, and from the ninth century onward the contiguous spaces controlled by different authorities were characterised by strips of territory called “marches” (from the German Mark). Political dominion extended essentially as far as tax collection reached, coinciding in practice with the economically controlled territory.
It is therefore the idea of a state enclosed within clearly defined borders that marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era: it is borders that create states, conferring on them an objective status. This new arrangement was also consolidated through the development of cartography. The modern territorial state, in fact, recognises and represents itself through maps.
Cartography thus becomes the transposition onto paper of the presumed difference that distinguishes those who are “inside” from those who are “outside”. This distinction serves that principle of classification which enables the transition from a spontaneous condition of aggregation to the identity-based recognition of a constituted group, precisely the kind represented by a state. The principle of nationality is in fact founded on the separation of peoples: the task is to classify in order to separate.
When in 1961 Jurij Gagarin gazed out from the small porthole of his Vostok 1, he said: “From up here the Earth is beautiful, without frontiers or borders”. A beautiful image, but one stripped of human history, which is precisely what produced those frontiers and borders. It has often happened, since the nineteenth century, that to justify desires or demands for separation, theorists have posited “natural” borders. Thinking of something as “natural” renders it unavoidable, if not outright legitimate: how often do we use the word “natural” to assert something taken for granted? Thus, it comes about that rivers, mountain ranges, and other territorial features end up being used to justify certain separations. In Africa, for example, colonial administrations made extensive use of rivers to draw borders, forgetting that those rivers, in many cases, were sites of aggregation rather than division. As Pierre Larousse wisely observed: “Nature is absolutely innocent of the frontiers of which we accuse it of having created”. None of the social and political phenomena tied to a territory arise from a discontinuity of a “natural” kind.
Pascal once said: “A strange kind of justice, bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other”.
If borders frequently cause problems and produce differences, sometimes their absence or indeterminacy is equally a source of misunderstanding. There are cases, in fact, in which borders are not accepted by the parties involved, having not been sanctioned by bilateral agreements. There are cases in which the ceasefire line drawn at the end of a conflict to silence the guns ends up becoming a permanent boundary, even though the parties do not recognise it. In Africa, for instance, roughly two-thirds of national borders have not yet been formally delimited. Another region where borders are heavily contested is Kashmir, where the maps of China, India, and Pakistan overlap over territories each considers its own. Take into account also the Israel-Palestine case, where numerous conflicts and successive territorial conquests have led to a lack of recognised borders, as in the case of the West Bank. This indeterminacy is a source of ongoing claims, which often turn into the violent clashes that have tragically marked the history of that region over the past eighty years.
This indefiniteness makes it impossible to establish and limit the rights of each party; not by chance, when two neighbouring peoples seal peace after a conflict, the very first thing they do is establish a border between their respective territories. The European Union also operates in a situation of not always clear borders. The Schengen Treaty has eliminated internal borders, allowing free movement, but the agreed-upon borders differ from those of the European Union, which in turn do not coincide with the eurozone. As for the external dimension, European policy in recent years has been essentially aimed at “externalising” its own borders, delegating their control to other countries such as Libya and Turkey. The European frontier thus multiplies into many sub-frontiers.
This constant shifting of borders ends up creating a less well-defined frontier zone, where the rules are less clearly set. Here, the border is not as immediately perceptible as in most cases; it is blurred, though no less effective for that, in obstructing the movement of individuals. In everyday reality, in fact, a border only becomes visible through signs that make it identifiable: boundary markers, border stones, road signs, barbed wire, walls… It is through these signs that national sovereignty is sensorially perceived. Many of us had convinced ourselves that after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the era of walls was essentially over, but that was not the case: for every kilometre of the Berlin Wall torn down, 172 new frontiers were created. In Eurasia alone, 27,000 kilometres of new borders have emerged.
The situation appears even more paradoxical when we consider that the process of globalisation has, in some respects, made historical, geographical, and cultural frontiers less relevant. At the same time, however, certain borders are becoming increasingly impossible to cross whilst goods and money move more freely, the movement of people is subject to ever more pervasive controls. Following the global growth of migratory processes, parties and movements have emerged in many parts of the world that oppose the entry of foreigners within “their” borders, making political use of this phenomenon.
Lampedusa is a case in point, transformed into a border, the ultimate limit of a Europe that did not even know it extended that far south, and of an Italy that had barely been aware the island existed until a few years ago. Lampedusa was not a border, but it became one through a process of bordering. It was certainly not nature that made Lampedusa the border we know today, but a gradual institutionalisation, mediatisation, and politicisation of events. Over time the island saw growing numbers of workers, law enforcement officers, journalists, and researchers. Media coverage transformed a rock that had until then been almost entirely overlooked into a kind of outpost in the defence of the national and European frontier. A wall was built in the middle of the sea.
The border is such a perfect idea that it tends to establish itself as an ideal type, as an archetype of the imagination. It is “good to think with”, Claude Lévi-Strauss would say. A line, elegant, secure, precise, unhesitating. The border, despite the multiplicity and variety of its concrete appearances on the surface of the earth, nonetheless tends to configure itself as not entirely lacking a certain dimension of abstraction.
The hypothesis of an “absence of borders” inevitably projects us on a journey through time, both into the past and into the future. Surely, the world of ancient prehistory was a world potentially without borders, except for those natural elements that, under certain physical and climatic conditions, could impede human mobility. In the coming decades, one of the arenas in which many crucial challenges will play out is outer space. Here is a dimension in which one can still speak of “borderless space”, though without ruling out a possible future claim, by states, to the spaces beyond the atmosphere through which satellites travel in ever increasing numbers.
How far upward can the assertion of the airspace above a state’s surface extend? How will possible future geopolitics of borders on other planets, on which, perhaps, strategic reserves of minerals and resources may one day be discovered, take shape?
Some Considerations on the Concept of “Border”
Borders and Frontiers
In Italian, “border” is a synonym for frontier. To distinguish them, etymological anchoring is of little help. The viscosity of the classical languages helps us only in part. In Latin, the concepts of border and frontier were primarily expressed by the terms fines, limes, and limen. Fines (plural of finis) denoted territorial limits or boundaries; limes described the fortified frontier, the defensive limit; limen meant threshold or border understood as a point of passage, and these concepts were quite distinct from civitas, Roman citizenship. The modern French and German languages offer no useful distinctions; only English has two valid terms for opening our discussion: border denotes a national boundary, while boundary denotes a more generic line of demarcation, often used for more specific delimitations and even in a figurative sense.
A clarification of meaning is therefore necessary. Taking English as our inspiration, we will speak of frontiers as lines of territorial demarcation and reserve the term border for the lines that separate groups of belonging that are not necessarily geographical, indeed, often of quite another type. This choice does not eliminate the ambiguous overlap of the two terms, since the frontiers of a political entity – the state, generally speaking – include a group of belonging defined by citizenship, whose members may nonetheless live beyond those very frontiers.
One possible distinction is that between societies and communities. The former differs in the type of resources distributed to their members in the name of the collective; in the nature of the public goods established within them; in the legal manner of that establishment; and in their capacity to support the interests and ambitions of subgroups. Communities, by contrast, share meanings, values, traditions, pride and honour, history and stories, and sometimes a vision of the sacred. However, as noted above, borders of various kinds are also found within what we conventionally call “society”. Some societies define themselves as communities, whilst others include multiple communities within them – and consequently, this classic distinction does not help us much.
The most important distinction is that between “territorial” and “functional” borders. Under conditions of low socio-economic development, low technology, and sense-based communication, all social interactions are tied to territory and distance, and therefore largely territorial in character. Changes in technology, economics, and communication favour the development of patterns of interaction and organisations that are increasingly non-spatial – in the sense that they bring together people separated by distance and deprived of direct face-to-face interaction. The borders of these entities are therefore functional, since they are based on the rules, norms, principles, roles, and behaviours that govern the identification of their members.
Systems whose membership is defined by spatially identifiable borders are therefore territorial units. States are a special type of territorial unit; nation-states are an even more specific variety of these.
Historically, the functional borders of the modern state tend to coincide within a given space and therefore tend themselves to assume a predominantly spatial-territorial dimension. Every modern state has aspired to this perfect overlapping of geographical frontiers and functional borders that is, to ensuring that frontiers enclose groups homogeneous from every point of view: language, culture, religion, rights, obligations, and so forth. This aspiration has led to countless conflicts and tragedies. At the same time, it is equally obvious that no modern state has ever succeeded in this endeavour except at the cost of fierce internal oppression.
Once the distinction between frontier and border has been established, it follows that frontiers are few, whilst borders between groups of belonging are very numerous: cultural borders, borders of administrative regimes, market borders, borders of legitimate coercion, social borders between groups according to multiple criteria of stratification.
Borders define collectivist and individualist criteria of exclusion and closure. Collectivist criteria of exclusion are directly responsible for transmitting advantages to other members of the group (for example, descendants through family, lineage, caste, religion, ethnicity, and state membership). Individualist criteria (such as property, power, credentials, and achievement) are equally designed to protect advantages but are less effective than collectivist criteria at transmitting those advantages to descendants or to the next generation of group members. In Western cultures, a long-term tendency has emerged towards the replacement of collectivist criteria of exclusion with individualist ones.
Identity as “Bridge” and as “Chasm”
One of the most important borders is the cultural one. It defines the distinctive spaces of the group of belonging of a population’s inhabitants – who are not necessarily concentrated geographically in the same space – based on the inhabitants’ own traits (language, religion, ethnicity, national identity, and so forth). It follows that the border of collective identity rests on the distinction between “us” and “the others”; this distinction operates through three symbolic codes: primordiality, culture/sacrality, and civilisation. Primordial, cultural, and civic codes can be classified according to the difficulty of crossing the border, the barriers and costs of entry and exit. This discussion allows us to use them for an analysis of the overall process of consolidation of any territorial political formation.
National identity is a cultural-sacred code par excellence. The nation-state superseded the previous opposition between primordial, localised identities and broader cultural-religious identities. National identity intervened as an intermediary between large cultural groups (Christianity, Roman citizenship) and the small, localised primordial and civic identities (communes, orders, and so forth). The nation therefore standardised and integrated primordial and cultural identities by creating a broader set of identities, practices, and rules. But at the same time, it differentiated and internally divided the broad non-territorial groups of belonging whose ties were based on language, religion, and ethnicity.
In this sense, national identity is a form of expansion insofar as it can activate and sustain forms of solidarity and trust that go beyond the narrow circle of known people and face-to-face relationships. Yet national identity is also a form of “contraction” insofar as it moves away from the previous broader religious, linguistic, or cultural communities.
Thus, identity can have “bridge” effects, broadening the scope of collective solidarity, as well as “fracture” or “chasm” effects – that is, effects of exclusion and segregation. Primordial identities generally produce discriminatory closure effects, since they are highly inflexible. Cultural and sacred identities are more open to permeability, but they imply the assimilation and acceptance of a code by those previously excluded. Only civic-based identities, premised on a process of learning and excluding all elements of primordialism or sacrality, appear capable of absorbing new members and of redefining themselves in an expansive and inclusive direction with respect to other identities.
Every process of changing borders within community-building redefines the groups of belonging characterised by different levels of identity/solidarity. This means that different national societies are endowed with different levels of identity/solidarity and can be affected in different ways by processes of redefining groups of belonging associated with the broadening of the division of labour and social interactions beyond the borders of the nation-state.
Until recently we might have said that we live in an era of accelerated redefinition of borders – and therefore of identities and codes of closure – and of stable frontiers. Recent times and events cast doubt on that stability, but they do not alter the era of border redefinition. Gender borders and family borders, however, are changing, broken apart and reorganised in every possible way. Tastes and fashions are becoming universalised (consider music); new technologies (visas, the internet, and so forth) are altering economic borders and allowing the mobility of goods and services no longer subject to similar regulations. Immigration penetrates physical and economic borders without being able to enter primordial ones, and sometimes not even cultural ones. Sacred codes are being disrupted by the decline of religion and of concepts such as social class, rank, order, and rationality, alongside humanism. Moreover, social media-mediated communication is creating new communities of meaning.
In this process, the European Union plays a decisive role. Its project has been to progressively attenuate and ultimately eliminate borders between states in certain specific areas: economics and trade, the mobility of productive factors and persons, exclusively national jurisdictions, and a single currency. At the same time, however, the European Union has left other crucial sectors almost entirely to national competence, such as taxation, welfare, national identity, and judicial, military, and coercive authority (it has neither an FBI nor its own military forces). It has promoted the greater permeability of almost all borders, thereby bringing about their disjunction and a decreasing degree of overlap.
It is difficult to conceive of and manage situations in which economic and political-administrative borders, or coercive and cultural ones, do not coincide, in which political-administrative rights or cultural identities are not territorially congruent with economic rights and transactions. It is also difficult to aspire to, advocate for, or defend such a configuration of borders. When the demands of the times seem to call for new advances in the direction of deeper integration, other factors connected precisely to nation-states seem to make them extremely difficult.
It is easy to say what the European Union cannot do and therefore should not do: exhume and reactivate primordial and cultural codes of identity, which, however much they enhance and defend familiarity, facilitate shared meanings, homogeneous practices, and resembling values, but also carry a strong capacity for exclusion and marginalisation. There is no way to progress towards integration since appeals to such identity codes. All that remains are the codes of civilisation on which to find a level of European identity that can serve as a basis for moving forward to meet the challenges ahead. It is on this terrain that today we find the most significant gap: perhaps we should have invested more in these themes during quieter times.
The political boundary of Gorizia
By Raoul Pupo
Are we on a border or on a frontier? We might say both, at different times.
What a border is, the people of Gorizia know very well: the cursed white line in Piazza della Transalpina, on the graves of Merna, between the legs of the cow at Rafut. The frontier, by contrast, is a territory, an area of overlap between the suburbs of worlds whose centres lie far away.
Here in Gorizia, the worlds that overlap are three: Italian, Slavic, and German. In other parts of the Adriatic frontier, that long coastal strip running from the Gulf of Trieste down to Montenegro, the Hungarian world and the overseas are added: the Italian peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean.
Frontier, then, means overlaps and intersections: in some circumstances these prove extremely positive (consider the development of Trieste in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which depended almost entirely on external contributions), and in others extremely problematic.
Along the Adriatic frontier, the problematic dimension of frontier life exploded in the mid-nineteenth century, because of religious wars. We are not talking about traditional religions – on the contrary, Trieste has been an exemplary place of religious tolerance –, but about the new civil religions of modernity. First and foremost, the religion of the fatherland, and of the various possible fatherlands of a region plural in languages, cultures, and ethnicities; and second, the great totalitarian ideologies such as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.
The new fault lines and points of conflict were also intertwined, in some cases overlapping, and decades of conflict followed, some of them extremely bloody. For this reason, the Upper Adriatic region that in Italy we call Venezia Giulia has been rightly considered by historians as a “laboratory of modernity” in its most deteriorated aspects: struggles between nationalisms, frontlines of world wars, successive totalitarian regimes, oppression of national minorities, extreme forms of political violence including the Nazi industrialisation of death, and the forced displacement of populations.
This frontier land was also marked by the crossing of histories: the best way to understand absolutely nothing about what happened from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century is to insist on applying the logic of a single national history.
If you do that, for example, you cannot understand why in 1848 in Gorizia and Trieste no revolution broke out, or why Giulian nationalism was not anti-French but anti-Slavic and taught anti-Slavism to Italian nationalists. Nor can you understand the logic, admittedly a logic of death, behind the foiba massacres of 1943 and 1945, which represent the extension into what Italians call Venezia Giulia, but which others consider the Slovenian littoral and Croatian Istria, of the extreme practices of struggle and repression that had taken shape on the Yugoslav front. Nor, again, can you understand why the Risiera of San Sabba is the only police detention camp where the Nazis carried out mass killings, something that did not happen in Italy or on the Western Front, but did happen on the Eastern one.
I will stop at this point regarding the logics of violence, whilst noting that history moved on and presented us with a completely different phase, one marked no longer by fracture and confrontation, but by pacification and reconciliation.
Pacification and reconciliation are two distinct stages, but to set the overall process in motion, certain conditions must be in place. The minimum condition is not merely that peace breaks out, because that happened between the two world wars as well, but that it becomes consolidated, that it becomes the desired horizon, and that it is perceived as a concrete good.
In Gorizia and Trieste, this occurred beginning in the 1960s, through a combination of both local and national pressures. Locally, the awareness that the absurdity of the border had to be overcome by launching forms of cross-border cooperation yielded excellent results, not only in terms of reducing tensions but also in terms of considerable economic benefits. To this was added, more easily in Gorizia, less so in Trieste, the beginning of the integration of the Slovenian minority into local institutions.
At the national level, awareness of the existence of common economic interests between Italy and Yugoslavia, above all strategic interests in terms of protection against the Soviet threat, gave rise to the season of the “bridge-border”, of large-scale border trade and then of the Alpe Adria working community. This season lasted through the 1980s and resolved many problems, though not all, because it did not erase the mutual suspicions present in frontier populations as a legacy of previous conflicts.
The following season arrived in the 1990s with the collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This created the principal key condition for launching reconciliation policies: on the objective level, the disappearance of mutual threat; on the level of feeling, the fading of mutual fear. There was no longer a Yugoslav People’s Army perceived as capable of descending at any moment on Gorizia and Trieste. At the same time, Italy showed no revanchist impulses but instead took on responsibility for Slovenia’s air defence.
At that point it became possible to open the reconciliation process, which went through several phases. It began with cold reconciliation, that of historians, through bilateral commissions. Starting in the 1990s, Italian and Slovenian researchers began to discuss and study together subjects that had until then been considered provocative, such as the foiba and the exodus, without thereby forgetting others, such as frontier fascism and Italian occupation policies in the Balkans during the Second World War.
Then came the phase of reassessing memory, which in Italy led to the establishment of the Day of Remembrance. This was a just and necessary initiative of moral recognition toward the victims of those terrible years, the relatives of those killed in the foiba and the Giulian-Dalmatian exiles. At the same time, however, the valorisation of one of the divided memories of the frontier inevitably put the other frontier memories under pressure, and this risked derailing the entire reconciliation process.
In the case of Gorizia, the opportunity was seized to take the most difficult but indispensable step. The initiative came from above, from the highest levels of the institutions, with meetings between the Presidents of neighbouring republics, first in Trieste in 2010 and then again in Trieste in 2020, focused on the most contentious memorial symbols, such as the monuments at Basovizza. At that point the ground was ready for the final step: GO!25 (Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture 2025).
From this very brief overview it is possible to draw a few small lessons.
We have seen how certain conditions must exist in order for a process of pacification and reconciliation to begin: the achievement of a stable equilibrium, which is not necessarily “right” as the Giulian-Dalmatian exiles know very well, but which removes many of the causes of conflict; the fading of mutual perceptions of threat; the advantage of friendship.
Missing from this list, however, is the fundamental condition: political will, that is, the decision of human beings. Indeed, those decisions are what make the difference because they can choose to invest in conflict, and in peace, and over the past century and a half we have seen both examples.
It is a question of political class, but politicians are elected by the people. Therefore, it is not only a question of those who govern, but also of those who send them to govern. It is, in the end, a question that concerns all citizens, that is, all of us, and our choices.
Passeurs. A Border Practice
By Monique Veaute
Some months ago, whilst attending a stimulating discussion on democracy at margins during the presentation of the Annale volume edited by Feltrinelli in Rome, I was struck by a very precise definition: margins are not simply an “outside”, but a space in which inclusion and exclusion, visibility and invisibility, legitimacy and delegitimisation are renegotiated; mobile, interstitial zones that traverse and contaminate the centre. In short, the margin understood not as suburb, but as laboratory.
The travelling series of meetings, Storie di confine/Border Stories, started from a very simple yet very demanding question: does a recognisable European cultural project still exist, or has Europe remained primarily an institutional architecture, devoid of a shared imaginary?
It is a question that, as cultural operators, concerns us directly, because if we believe that Europe is not merely a system of treaties or institutions but also a cultural construction, then we must interrogate our capacity to produce common narratives, build spaces of relation, and make visible what connects us beyond our differences.
Precisely for this reason, I must confess that at the outset I was not entirely at ease with the theme of the meeting held in Pordenone on March 3rd: the cultural border.
In recent years, indeed, the concept of border has progressively collapsed onto an almost exclusively negative meaning: as closure, limit, wall; as a defensive line against the other. In this sense, it appears as an obstacle to the circulation of ideas, to the mobility of people, to the very possibility of creation. This is, in my view, a semantic transformation very evident in contemporary public debate. The border is no longer perceived as a space of passage, but as a device of exclusion.
And yet, on reflection, I came to realise that perhaps the problem is not the border itself, but the way in which we inhabit it. As in the debate about margins, the border too is not necessarily a line that separates definitively. It is a zone, a space that can close or generate. The border can harden and become defensive identity, or it can become a space of encounter.
In this sense, the border closely resembles what we today call the “third space”: an intermediate zone in which identities are not fixed once and for all but are redefined in the act of encounter. Personally, I think of it as an outpost of the possible, a place of movement against the stagnation of ideas.
In 1986, when we began devising the Festival di Villa Medici, we were not thinking in these theoretical terms, but essentially we were already working in an interstitial zone. Jean-Marie Drot, the director of Villa Medici who had succeeded Jean Leymarie, had invited me two years earlier to direct the week dedicated to contemporary music, a field that was already familiar to me: when I worked at France Musique, I had focused on the dissemination of works by Boulez, Xenakis, Aperghis, Hersant, and Levinas.
The Festival was a project born within L’Estate a Villa Medici, a Franco-Italian initiative. And that was already a border. Villa Medici was a magnificent but closed place. Jean-Marie Drot told me he had immediately understood that every day he would have to “open the windows”. Behind every door, he said, there were ghosts: resistances, fears, entrenched habits. Inviting a public beyond the Academy’s own was a small revolution; opening the Villa to the people of Rome was an even greater one. At the time, only French citizens could enter, and to do so they had to show their passport. The first border we confronted was not between continents or nations, but between a closed Academy and the city that surrounded it.
The first Fête de la Musique was unforgettable: the gardens open, Roman rock and electro-wave bands alongside the most rigorous musicians of the contemporary tradition. It was not a provocation. It was a gesture of openness. I still remember the evening of Zizi Jeanmaire and Les Folies Bergère. For some it was an unacceptable provocation: too spectacular, too frivolous for Villa Medici. And yet, the audience was on its feet, and the day after the authorities were asking for front-row seats. That moment taught me that the border runs through the distinction between high culture and popular culture as well. That institutionalisation is no guarantee of vitality, and that lightness can contain a form of radicalism.
The same applies to repertoire. I care about repertoire, yes, but on the condition that it is revisited through a modern lens. Boulez conducting Ravel has nothing to do with a nostalgic, syrupy Ravel. It is a living, contemporary Ravel. This is true for Baroque music placed alongside new tendencies in the festival’s first edition, which we accordingly called “Baroque and Tendencies”. It is true for classical dance traversed by the experiments of Maguy Marin, Régine Chopinot with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Akram Khan, Alain Platel. It is true for the encounters between Lucia Ronchetti and new electronic music. It is true for Ryūichi Sakamoto in dialogue with digital arts. It is true for Marina Abramović, William Kentridge, Jan Fabre, Heiner Goebbels, Peter Brook. In all these cases the border was not erased: it was crossed.
The European Union came into force in 1993, but Europe was already a space of relations. There was not yet a fully realised Europe on the institutional level, but a cultural network existed. From that initial Franco-Italian opening, the Festival had expanded almost naturally to the other European Academies present in Rome: Germany, Spain, then others. In 1990 the Fondazione Romaeuropa Arte e Cultura was thus established. Its president, Giovanni Pieraccini, had described the Festival as the dialogue of European art and culture accompanying the unification of the continent, but had added that this dialogue needed to open to the civilisations of other continents, because European culture was not, and would never be, autarchic.
For us this was self-evident: in 1989 at Villa Medici we invited Manu Dibango to perform. In 1990, at Piazza del Popolo, Cheb Khaled and Angélique Kidjo brought sonorities that for many were still “elsewhere”; and further still, Taraf de Haïdouks, Cesária Évora, Sufi music from Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt. We brought the Royal Khmer Academy Ballet to the Teatro Sistina.
This is not exoticism, not a postcard, it is the recognition that cultures are not sealed compartments. For many generations of Europeans this opening was also a lived experience. I think of the “Interrail generation”, and of what we would later call the “Erasmus generation”: young people traversing the continent with an ease that would have been unthinkable just decades earlier, discovering that Europe is not an abstract concept but a space of shared experiences. This mobility created a shared imaginary, perhaps more powerful than many political declarations: languages blending, cities that from afar become near, cultures that grow familiar whilst remaining distinct. In short, the awareness that the strength of the European idea lies in contamination, not in purity.
Today none of this can be taken for granted: new generations find themselves living in a context where mobility coexists with new forms of closure, with identity-based fears, with a very strong resurgence of the word “border” in its most defensive sense. Precisely for this reason I believe that cultural work carries a particular responsibility: to keep building opportunities for crossing, to create spaces in which differences can meet without being immediately transformed into opposition.
Jean-Marie Drot often said that encounter is what creates, that many things come into being in the precise moment when two characters complement or confront each other. I believe this idea finds very precise expression in the words of Felwine Sarr in his essay Habiter le monde. Essai de politique relationnelle:
Ce monde au sein duquel nous vivons est une œuvre collective que nous créons et produisons. Par la créativité, nous le rendons extensible et incommensurable. Par la poésie et les arts, nous pouvons habiter l’infini du monde, ainsi que ses dimensions les plus subtiles et les plus élevées.
[This world in which we live is a collective work that we create and produce. Through creativity we make it expansible and immeasurable. Through poetry and the arts, we can inhabit the infinite of the world, as well as its most subtle and elevated dimensions.]
Multiculturalism is not the accumulation of differences. It is the extension of the world.
Thinking about recent experiences, some projects that, in different ways, move in this direction come to mind. For example, the experience of the Republic of Love conceived by Milo Rau for the Wiener Festwochen: a kind of temporary assembly, an artistic and political device at once, that attempts to imagine new forms of coexistence. Or experiences such as the last edition of Documenta in Kassel, where the collective curatorship placed at the centre a dimension that is today very significant for new generations: shared authorship.
Increasingly, artists are working in groups, in collectives, in forms of cooperation that call into question the figure of the solitary author. It is something we have also observed in our work at the Festival: new generations seem to seek less individual affirmation and more the construction of temporary communities of work and thought.
It may be from here that we can begin to rethink the role of cultural institutions as well. The key, for me, is a French word: passeur, which captures better than any other the role that such institutions should have today. The passeur is one who helps others cross over. Not the protagonist of the journey. Not the one who creates the work: but the one who makes encounter possible. I have always thought of myself in this way, and I believe this must be the role of us as cultural operators: not to impose visions, but to facilitate encounters.
To create the conditions under which artists can work, ideas can circulate, audiences can encounter something they have not yet known. Because when curiosity is created, hostility disappears.
The cultural experience does not only serve to confirm what we already know or already love: it also serves to shift the gaze. And perhaps this is precisely the task of us passeurs: to make that shift possible.
In this sense, the cultural border is not a line, but the space that allows this movement. A fragile space, one that demands responsibility and care.
Its fragility is not weakness, it is vulnerability. It is where differences meet without guarantees, where identities are not protected by habit and must accept being called into question.
A border only lives if it is inhabited consciously. Left to itself, it hardens. The responsibility is ours. Ours is the choice to turn it into a wall or into a space to be crossed. Making the world more liveable does not mean eliminating borders, but sustaining their fragility, accepting their risk, and taking care of what happens when two worlds touch.
