Pushing Border Art’s Borders - session #5

Traveling Borders: A Journey Across the Italian Margins viaPhotographic Art Research
Nicoletta Grillo, Hasselt University

Drawing on her recent book on the Swiss–Italian border and on an extended photo-textual travelogue produced in the field, Nicoletta Grillo examines this borderscape as a lived and continuously reconfigured space. The lecture combines photographic images with performative reading to trace how the border materializes through everyday movements, memories, and representations. Beginning with stories of women factory workers who once crossed the border woods at night to gather lilies of the valley, and extending to present-day cross-border commutes and migratory passages, the project interrogates the invisibility of the border as both a physical and imaginative construct.

Combining perspectives from critical border studies, urban research, photography theory and practice, the presentation explores how landscape imagery and oral accounts reveal the border’s shifting meanings. The Alps emerge as a site where histories of labor, migration, and surveillance intersect, yet also as a space of connection and resistance to national demarcations. The performative essay invites us to re-imagine the border not as a fixed line on a map but as a dynamic constellation of relations, gestures, and traces—where the crossings of moving bodies continually redraw the border.

Nicoletta Grillo is an Assistant Professor in Visual Arts at Hasselt University Faculty of Architecture and Arts. Active both as a researcher and artist, her interests lie in the potential of photographic media and contemporary art to reimagine marginal landscapes and subjects through both practice-based and theoretical research. She is the author of the book "Photography and Invisible Borders. Spaces of Imagination between Switzerland and Italy" (Brill, 2024), which explores forms of counter-representations in borderscapes blending perspectives from urban studies, contemporary art history,
and research in the arts. Her latest project focuses on liminal spaces between land and sea, particularly in Southern Italy.

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