Abstrakt
The question of the frontiers and the perception of their reinforcement or weakening is a hot question nowadays. In the semiotics of culture elaborated by Lotman and the Tartu school the frontier is a central theme; being able to articulate the space of the semiosphere in a dialectic of inside/outside (Lotman, Uspenskij 1975), it is generally perceived as necessary for the self-definition of a cultural system, which is established in contrast to what is felt as foreign, alien.
If it is true that the European becomes conscious of himself through what Schippers has defined as the 'cartographic perception of himself and his membership' (Schippers 2000), the debated question of a new hard border in Ireland can rearticulate the discourse about the identities. Starting from a definition of the frontier in semiotic terms, this work seeks to analyze how every disposal thought for a separation can be put in discussion by a community and consequently change its meaning and value.
Based on the paper by Audra Mitchell and Liam Kelly (Mitchell, Kelly 2010), the present lecture proposes the idea to apply the suggestions from Michel De Certeau on the 'tactics' people can develop in order to resist the power, here reinterpreted as a way to dynamize and alter the internal frontiers of a city like Belfast. This case study can cast a light on the fragile theoretical foundations the concept of frontier is built on, revealing that the historical and cultural 'motivations' of every sign are never stable.
The question of the hard border reemerges from a political, social and economic background which is changing again, supported or contested, but able to reshape the geography of a country and, possibly, the historical memory of it.