Description
The border between Italy and Slovenia has undergone several reconfigurations throughout the past decades, up until the dismantlement of border control infrastructures following Slovenian accession to the Schengen area. Nevertheless, the forest and mountainous border areas located in North-East Italy have become an integral part of the informal migration corridor of the so-called Balkan Route. This paper interrogates migrants’ spatial tactics during the final part of their Balkan Route “Games” and their transition towards a new chapter in their migratory projects. Through a focus on the objects left behind by migrants crossing the border and walking towards the city of Trieste, I focus on migrants’ engagement in material and embodied frontier-making practices. The strategic discharging of objects, papers, and pieces of clothing in the forest constructs a material, shifting, and embodied frontier away from the administrative border. These tactics can be seen as part of the construction and negotiation of migrants’ vernacular knowledge of the territories that they cross, which are often mediated by smugglers, information and solidarity networks, and border authorities. Finally, I look at how these objects are co-opted and instrumentalised within anti-migration narratives that leave space for actions directed towards the re-establishment of physical and digital border infrastructures to pull the border back to its administrative location.
