Live free or die motionless : Walking the migrant path from Italy to France

Abstract

This essay and the photographs examine visual traces of irregular mobility in the border landscape between Italy and France. The ruined buildings and objects witness decades of movement of undocumented people on this old migrant path across the mountains. By taking the theoretical concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) the essay argues that the Path of Hope can be thought of as a memory site through which the issues of migration in contemporary Europe can be seen in a more sustainable light. The ruins and discarded objects link memories of different places – including different border zones – in ways that allow us to critically examine borders as a practice – rather than as existing dividing lines. Reading visuality of this border zone allows one to imagine a migrant’s vision of the landscape.