Transbordering: Notes from a Quiet Border

Stoppani, Teresa (2026) Transbordering: Notes from a Quiet Border. Journal of Borderlands Studies. pp. 1-26. ISSN ISSN: 0886-5655

Abstract

Transbordering moves around and across the now quiet and permeable border between Venezia Giulia in north-east Italy and Slovenia, touching Gorizia/Gorica and Trieste/Trst, and moving along the Isonzo/Soča river it meets the Mediterranean. Interspersed with autobiographical notes, the narrative weaves a multiplicity of voices drawn from philosophy, history, news, media, political debate, environmental activism, architecture, photography, psychiatric and social reform, migration studies, documentary film, memoir, poetry, contemporary music and performance. The stories move back and forth in time to reinvent a chronology of proximities and returns, uncanny similarities, multiplicities and micro-separations. This is a tale of trans-bordering: of mixed identities and backgrounds, of fragile and porous national borders, of invisible divisions and removable boundaries, of vulnerable frontiers, oscillating divisions and conflicted confining ones, and of persisting subtle differences and new overt ones. It is one of the many possible stories of an apparently pacified borderland, where the border line traced on maps is almost invisible on the ground but continues to divide land and powers, conceal underlying scars and open fractures, and reshape identities. But identities are not linear, they transborder.

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