by InTrieste
Beneath the city streets, in the cool, echoing tunnels of the former World War II air-raid shelter known as Kleine Berlin, a new multimedia installation invites visitors to reflect on the meanings of borders, migration, and change.
Zona | Border Lines, opening Friday and running through October 12, is curated by the cultural association Kokoschka Revival and co-organized with Trieste’s Department of Culture and Tourism as part of the GO!2025 & Friends and Barcolana initiatives. Conceived by artists Ana Shametaj and Giuditta Vendrame, the multi-channel installation is the culmination of two years of artistic research at the intersection of geography, identity, and environment.
The exhibition merges visual arts, sound, architecture, history, and anthropology into an immersive experience that uses the subterranean landscape of Trieste to probe both physical and psychological thresholds. At its core lies a study of traditional folk songs — seen as vehicles of passage and dialogue between cultures and territories.
Through two complementary installations, Sot Glas and River Chants, Shametaj and Vendrame explore the border as a physical, emotional, and symbolic threshold. The labyrinthine tunnels of Kleine Berlin, with their damp stone walls and natural echoes, provide a fitting setting — a metaphor for the subconscious of the borderland itself.
Sot Glas (from the Friulian sot, “below,” and Slovenian glas, “voice”) unfolds as an introspective path marked by warm, maternal light. Installed in a grotto-like passage where karst formations have reshaped the walls, the piece draws on oral and feminine memory, emphasizing the power of folk traditions to preserve and redefine cultural identity within a porous, inclusive space.
In contrast, River Chants extends outward. Set in a tunnel partially flooded with water, it uses cool tones and aquatic scenography to create what the artists describe as a “poetic and sonic hydrology.” Water here becomes both metaphor and medium — a reminder of the fragility of ecosystems and the constant motion of boundaries, both human and natural.
The creative process behind River Chants is also the focus of a documentary of the same name, presented as part of the exhibition and scheduled to air on Rai 3 on October 5 and 8. The film will later be available on the RaiPlay platform.
Hosting Zona | Border Lines within the karstic galleries of Kleine Berlin deepens the installation’s resonance. Once a place of wartime refuge, the space now becomes a site of reflection — where art, light, and sound transform the underground passages into an evocative meditation on the shifting lines that define and connect us.
