Vallée de la Roya and its opaque infrastructures of transit. Inhabiting the border.

Abstract

This paper offers a closer look at the French-Italian border and its violence. The border in the Vallée de la Roya restores some conditions of rurality, transit, and danger to which the migratory route is confronted. In this context, different genealogies of displacement, social fabrics and spatial forms are forced to coexist and resist situations of crisis in different ways, contributing to ongoing processes of dematerialisation of the border. At the southern French-Italian border and specifically in the valley emerge new forms of spaces and practices of holding, as the simultaneous and ambivalent conflict between support and hostility, mobility and immobility, visibility and invisibility. The progressive increase of transits and the subsequent enclosure of the internal frontier engender dispersed and mobile massive militarisation as well as important acts of reception. The valley and the experience of Le Camping encompass a new fragment of the infrastructure of solidarity that explains its performativity as a transnational dispositive of protection, enabling transits through the informal, diffuse, and opaque system of collective resistances of architecture.