EPISCOPE OF BORDERSCAPES: Projections of the Gorizia Region's pasts and futures as part of European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

In 2025, the towns of Nova Gorica and Gorizia (Slv. Gorica) will be the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) with the motto GO! Borderless. Despite the slogan evoking a borderless future, the events of the previous two years have reinforced the belief that borders (physical and administrative dividing lines) and boundaries (social frontiers) should not be left out of our everyday lives. Therefore, borders and boundaries, together with the connections they bridge, will be the focus of our study of the multiverse of pasts, presents, and futures of the twin cities of Nova Gorica and Gorizia, as well as of the broader Gorizia cross-section of East and West, Mediterranean and Alps, Central Europe and Balkans, the Romanic, Slavic and once also Germanic worlds.

The project will, first, deal in a multidisciplinary way with past, present, and future borders and boundaries in Nova Gorica, Gorizia, and the Gorizia region; second, it will rethink the actual and alternative possibilities of borderlessness addressed by the ECoC programme; and third, it will prepare Episcope, the accompanying year-long programme of the ECoC GO!2025 (the name of the programme alludes simultaneously to the Epicenter, the administrative centre of the ECoC, and to the projection device). In designing the programme, we are guided by the awareness of the role and responsibility of the scientific community in the formation and calibration of perspectives on the past, everyday life, and the future. We recognise that the past and the future are similarly inaccessible yet integral to our imaginations. As researchers, we are co-creators of key issues, ‘matters of concern’, not just investigators of ‘matters of fact’. Based on regional studies, critical heritage studies, and border studies, the research part of the project will map the main themes and boundaries of Gorizia’s pasts and futures, which will be discussed in three thematic sections:

• In the first thematic work package, Languages – Voices – Common(s), we will focus on the elements and practices that connect us as individuals in a community and separate us from others: languages (Slovenian, Italian, Friulian), dialects, (oral) traditions and heritages.
• In the second thematic work package, Borders – Boundaries – Paths, we will reflect on the relations between borders and boundaries in the context of the delimitation of the Gorizia region, the construction of the new city and the possibility of creating connections and building common worlds.
• In the third thematic work package, Future Heritages –Heritage Futures, we will consider the relations between the past and heritage and between the expected and the desired ‘borderless’ futures in the context of Europeanisation and an alternative, inclusive and multiperspective cosmopolitics.

The applied part of the project consists of the design and implementation of the Episcope, a year-long companion accompanying programme to the ECoC GO!2025. Every month in 2025, we will organise and carry out several different events – lectures, round tables, meetings, presentations of research and artistic productions, as well as workshops for the inhabitants of the twin cities and the wider Gorizia hinterland on both sides of the border, for students of the universities of Nova Gorica, Trieste, and Udine, dealing with the Gorizia's multivocalities, boundaries, and heritages. In addition to the Episcope programme carried out, the result of the project will also be a monograph with contributions addressing the primary nodes of Gorizia’s pasts and futures.

The project is a scientific contribution to heritage and border studies. While contributing to the primary goal of ECoC, namely to create a transboundary cultural ecosystem, it will promote the visibility of the results to a broader (and not only scientific) international audience. Thinking about borderscapes and borderlessness will contribute to social inclusion and the promotion of an open, peaceful, and sustainable society.

Financial sources for the project are a public institution GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica and the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.