Soglie

Abstract

The author approaches the concept of threshold by exploring the spatial and temporal dimensions in which it is experienced and shaped today. Rather than searching for and providing a definition, she engages the reader in actively sharing her own journey through, and ongoing dialogue with, images and writings: indoor environments, afterlife islands, lonely dark paths, embracing statues challenge and question both the author and the reader’s gaze –what do we see? what we don’t see? am I within or beyond the threshold? do I feel included or exluded? do I dare to step in and to move on or do I want to keep still and withdraw?– while writers and poets’s voices interact with the author’s caleidoscopic narratives on threshold as condition and source of both loss and encounter, security and threat, pain and hope, memories and visions. Emotionally charged and cognitively productive, spatial and temporal thresholds meet and merge in the third dimension of waiting: patience and resilience –like the queuers’ art of slow down/step aside/keep on moving– happen to be effective strategies of survival for travellers in the age of brutal speed and proliferating borders.