June 2022

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like the world was on the verge of an era when borders would become increasingly irrelevant. German reunification appeared to suggest a prelude to a great international unification that soon became known as globalisation. The consolidation of large economic and trading areas, like the European Union, accompanied by advances in communication and transport technologies – particularly the appearance of the Internet and cheap fossil fuels – suggested that the world had shrunk and that everything could move across it freely: information, goods, money and people.

What is certain, however, is that globalisation has not meant a more open world or the disappearance of borders. Over recent decades, more borders have sprung up. There are now more physical and territorial borders, as well as social and economic borders, particularly borders that separate social groups according to income or ethnicity, especially when they have been radicalised. And between rich immigrants and poor immigrants, just to give a few examples.

For all these reasons, borders and borderlands have today become a focus for many disciplines, even disciplines that had not previously concerned themselves with borders. Political science, history, geography, sociology and anthropology, philosophy and architecture, literary criticism and art in general have all analysed, studied, observed and denounced a world that is ever more divided and fragmented; a space that is increasingly connected and, at the same time, more isolated.

That is why we propose setting up a residential study centre to foster studying and writing in greater depth about borders. It must be a workspace that is open, that does not reproduce this proliferation of borders, and as such, facilitates the exchange of experience, suggestions and ideas across disciplines. A place that favours hybrid, porous, undisciplined and travelling forms of knowledge.