MIGRATING LANDSCAPES, NEW GEOGRAPHIES AND THRESHOLDS. THE ITALIAN-FRENCH CASE.

Migrations define new landscapes and new geographies. Spaces that, characterized by transient illegal circulations and dispersion processes, emerge as exclusive fields of study and project. In the Mediterranean basin, which is central to the migratory flows of human beings crossing it in their tentative to reach Northern Europe, migratory phenomena are shown in their tragic dimension, leading to continuous violations of human rights and ecological impoverishment. Yet, in the Mediterranean and beyond, it is also landscapes that migrate. This is supported by the Migrating Mediterranean research, a critical mapping elaborated by the Dutch-Italian firm Openfabric in 2022, which focuses on the representation of migrations of people but also of landscapes and extractive resources. The map delves into the Mediterranean continent, identifying agents of instability to show that the contextual framework we traditionally think of as fixed, is in fact not. Resources, humans, animals, plant species, cultivations, cultures, literature, ecosystems, tectonics are all in continuous motion, proving that the Mediterranean has to be recognized as being in constant metamorphosis. Borders that become permeable gradually turn into thresholds, precarious, fragmented filters, material and immaterial discontinuities. Employing the concept of threshold represents a crucial step in overcoming the ideas of margin or limit, since it allows the evolution of the legal border into a design border. Exemplary cases of this condition are the migratory chains that insist on the Western Liguria region from the territorial junction of Savona to the French-Italian border, following a trajectory that from Ventimiglia continues towards the Western Piedmont Alps. Through the investigation of this case, scene of cross-border flows of workers but also of illegal trespassing since the 19th century, the landscapes of the border materialize as areas in transition capable of generating changing spatialities and addressing some of the most dramatic contemporary critical issues, such as illicit migrant flows and climate change.