Per un dialogo transdisciplinare tra antropologia e pratiche artistiche contemporanee nella ricerca sui confini

The article focuses on the ways in which transdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and contemporary artistic practices, with an emphasis on education, can help us reinvent research on borders, developing new methods aimed at social change and capable of responding to the need for new research paradigms urged by radical transformations in contemporary political, social and cultural scenarios. More precisely, this paper has a twofold objective. The first is to show how transdisciplinary exchange between anthropology and contemporary art can advance reflection in the field of border studies, generating the conditions necessary to overcome the political ideology of borders as “lines in the sand” and proposing, instead, a reinterpretation of them as processual and relational, traversed by multiple tensions that point to new political possibilities. The second is to highlight how the border, taken as a subject of investigation but also as a transdisciplinary method, offers the opportunity for significant advances in the exchange between anthropology and contemporary art, not only at a heuristic level but also at an applicative level. In order to meet these objectives, reference will be made to the design of a participatory action research project carried out by the University of Bergamo as part of the PRIN BorderArt (E)Scapes project, which addressed the complex issue of borders from a historical-artistic, anthropological and geopolitical as well as methodological and disciplinary point of view, with the aim of developing new applied research methodologies, in which the tools of the historical- artistic discipline interacted with anthropological approaches.