The Inner Border as the Construction Site to Build a Hybrid Europe. The Case of South Tyrol

The frontier space builds hybrid and plural identities, which can be projected onto a larger scale to suggest new forms of coexistence and mixing. In the transition from speculative abstraction and graphic representation to application on the territory, borders mobilize, multiply and disintegrate to become frontiers: places of transformation, where the game of intercultural translation may be played. For cultural semiotics, borders and peripheries are zones of increased semiotic activities where the generation of new meanings is accelerated. This essay focuses on the historically contended and bilingual geographic area of South Tyrol as the object of ideological, political and legal discourse. A certain way of narrating it through a double understanding of frontier, as a space of conquest and place of cultural hybridization, makes it particularly suited as a source for stories about the construction and denial of a united Europe.