Paper short abstract:

Based on encounters with the material culture of an alpine border landscape and with permanent or intermittent dwellers, this contribution reflects on the convergence of everyday experience and artistic performance through the lens of semiotics and liminality.

Paper long abstract:

Carinthia ticks all the boxes of a marginal region. Situated at the southern edge of Austria in the Eastern Alps and with a Slovene-speaking minority, it is one of the border areas where bitter memories of a historical conflict continue to shape the present. However, it is also a place where a divisive narrative is challenged by everyday practices and performances; a cultural frontier (Peter Burke) where notions of mobility and settledness, belonging and exclusion, stasis and dynamism, language and silence are profoundly put into question.

Based on encounters with the material culture of an alpine border landscape, and with permanent or intermittent dwellers who know how to "read" it, this contribution reflects on the convergence of everyday experience and artistic performance. Reading buildings, interiors, access routes and the landscape itself through the lens of semiotics and liminality helps to discover how memory work and everyday activities at the margins are, in fact, challenging hegemonic narratives in ways that crucially contribute to central debates on globalisation, conviviality, inclusion and exclusion.