Matteo Attruia

Stato di confine (‘State of Border’) was created on the occasion of Nova Gorica – Gorizia European Capital of Culture 2025, following a series of workshops that Attruia conducted in several municipalities in the Friuli region. Within these artist-led workshops, the concept of the border was explored not as a line of separation, but rather as a threshold: a space in which different identities, through encounter, generate both tensions and possibilities. In a territory where the frontier is not only a geographical fact but also a historical, social, and symbolic condition, Attruia examines how the limit transforms into an inhabited threshold – a dynamic place of crossing and transformation. Building on these premises, the artist overturns the perspective through a linguistic play in which the “state border” becomes a “state of the border,” turning it into a psychological and emotional condition. Paradoxically, the border loses its connotation as a remote and peripheral margin and instead takes on that of a privileged point of observation of otherness, that ‘skewed, kaleidoscopic gaze’ – as defined by anthropologist Chiara Brambilla – that rests both on geographical borders and on ethno-social boundaries, as well as on the interactions that arise from them. The state of the border is at the same time a mark of belonging and a space of becoming.