Competing Visual Narratives of Borderland Regions:
Archives – Monuments – Institutions (1866–1954)

The workshop focusses on the region today comprising Friuli Venezia Giulia, South Tyrol, the Gorizia area, and Istria. It will examine the Alpine-Adriatic region, located at the crossroads of Italy, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia—a multinational area shaped by shifting borders and states, which had a profound impact on visual identities and practices of collecting, labelling, and archiving objects (such as photographs and films). These changes also affected the erection of monuments, the musealization and institutionalization of monument protection, as well as the establishment of institutions (e.g., institutes and universities) dedicated to visual culture, research, education, and heritage conservation.

The workshop, which brings together experts from Italy, Austria, Germany, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, discusses how to jointly explore this Alpine-Adriatic region from a multi-perspective approach. Participants analyze the attitudes, protection, dispossession, instrumentalization, and other uses of visual heritage in its various forms. Through case studies, the workshop aims to highlight the importance of adopting a transnational view of heritage in the present day.

The selected time frame spans from the annexation of Veneto to Italy (1866), which marked the new border with the Habsburg Monarchy, to the final demarcation of the border between Italy and Yugoslavia at the Gulf of Trieste (1954). Both liminal years are significant in the horizon of culture, visual heritage, and conservation.

Programme:

9.30 
Welcome and Introduction by Donata Levi, Barbara Kristina Murovec, Gerhard Wolf 

10.00 – 10.45 
Mario Braun: Photographic Documentation in Conservation and Restoration Practices in Croatia 
Vittorio Foramitti: Vienna 1913. Adria Ausstellung, the Last Celebration of the Austro-Hungarian Adriatic Sea 
Martina Visentin: Images of Monuments and Art Objects during the First World War. Italian vs. Austro-German Photographic Campaigns 

10.45 – 11.00 Coffee break 

11.00 – 11.45 
Jelena Todorović: From Merchants to Collectors. Serbian Families in Trieste and their Legacies 1850–1930s 
Karin Šmid: The (In)Visible Traces of Littoral Refugees and Emigrants in Maribor 
Tommaso Piffer: Cold War Heritage in the Friuli Region 

11.45 – 12.30 
Janez Premk: The Jewish in Gorizia. Visuality and Institutions 
Daria Brasca: Synagogues in Transition. Uses and Reuses of Jewish Heritage in the Alpine-Adriatic Region from the 1930s to the Postwar Era 
Francesco Pitassio: A No Man’s Land? Shaping Identity, Allegiances, Memory through Non-Fiction Cinema. The Case of Trieste and the Julian March 

12.30 – 15.00 Lunch  
Castello Fototeca  
Biblioteca Civica Vincenzo Joppi – Fototeca 

15.00 – 17.00 
Response by Gerhard Wolf 
Final Discussion moderated by Donata Levi, Barbara Kristina Murovec, Gerhard Wolf