Borderscaping: Estetica | Politica | Trans-territorialità. Nuove agency geografico-politiche nel Mediterraneo “oltre la linea”

This article discusses how rethinking borders can contribute to a critical refoundation of Political Geography. To this aim, the article proposes to rethink borders embracing the perspective of borderscaping. Specifically, the paper shows that the borderscaping approach can contribute to the refoundation of Political Geography by bringing together aesthetics and politics while relating the aesthetics-politics nexus to territoriality. In so doing, borderscaping counterpoints spatio-temporal topologies of the modern territorial imaginary and its Euclidean geometry whereas (re)affirming the link between a multi-dimensional territoriality of borders and politicalness. In this way, the borderscaping lens opens up the way for new geographical-political agencies. These conceptual insights are explored referring to the Mediterranean and pre- cisely to the Italian/Tunisian borderscape, which is investigated zooming in on the urban borderscape of Mazara del Vallo, in Sicily, and its relations with the city of Mahdia, in Tunisia. Describing the ethnographical research conducted in-between Mazara and Mahdia – including the making of a documentary film – the article presents an example of new geographical-political agency in the Mediterranean, which becomes possible “acting” on the nexus between aesthetics, politics and territoriality, or better, trans-territoriality (crossing the ontological, constitutive and configurative dimension of territoriality) as it is revealed by borderscaping.