Isonzo that Unites: Perspectives to overcome Borders

A project conceived and promoted by the Pordenonelegge.it Foundation with the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, as part of GO! 2025. The Isonzo/ Soča River, its transnational “identity,” its banks becoming a bridge of encounter and knowledge. 

Six Italian and Slovenian authors - Alex Devetak, Angelo Floramo, Mateja Gomboc, Anja Mugerli, Luigi Nacci and Antonella Sbuelz - six gazes and six video stories to rediscover and reread the history, landscape, traditions, culture, anecdotes and edges of a frontier waterway that has become #borderless in the year of GO! 2025. Tuesday, June 24 in Gorizia the presentation of the project: led by Gian Mario Villalta, artistic director of pordenonelegge, speakers: Alex Devetak, Mateja Gomboc, Antonella Sbuelz, Angelo Floramo. Open to all.

From the heights of Mount Travnik to the Adriatic coast of Friuli Venezia Giulia: a meandering riverbed that glows in emerald green and turns the color of the sky, an iridescent ribbon unique in its variety of landscapes and settlements, of lived experience and traditions. It is the Soča River, with its history so tied to the places and peoples it crosses, with its cross-border “identity” and its ability to become a liquid bridge for the people who live around its banks, an occasion for meeting and knowledge rather than a reason for separation. Isonzo che unisce / Združeni ob Soči precisely titles the project of an articulate six-voice docu-film, conceived and promoted by the Pordenonelegge.it Foundation with the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, as part of GO! 2025: a “fresco” of gazes in the form of video storytelling, a multimedia narrative that produces an unprecedented literary declination entrusted to six Italian and Slovenian authors - Alex Devetak, Angelo Floramo, Mateja Gomboc, Anja Mugerli, Luigi Nacci and Antonella Sbuelz - to restore the story, landscape, traditions, culture and anecdotes of the waterway that is tangible emblem of a crucial frontier of Mitteleuropa. An exciting navigation through folk traditions and the events of history, between the two World Wars and the icy time of the Iron Curtain, up to the rapprochement between people of Central European culture and our time that speaks of a Capital of Culture for the first time shared between opposite sides of the river, the scene of tragic and moving events.

The project will be presented on Tuesday, June 24, in Gorizia at the headquarters of Confindustria Alto Adriatico at 4 p.m., where pordenonelegge artistic director Gian Mario Villalta will converse with Alex Devetak, Mateja Gomboc, Antonella Sbuelz and Angelo Floramo,.whose video stories will be screened. Participation is free, info pordenonelegge.it. The six video stories will remain available on the YouTube channel of the Pordenonelegge.it Foundation - link here - with as many guided itineraries that wind between images and words, confronting places, art, nature, life that flows across the border between languages and realities that mix dialects, traditions, productive activities, food and wine habits, and artistic inspiration. Each author speaks his or her own language, while the translation flows: a journey, premiered at the Turin Book Fair, that starts at the headwaters of the Soča/Isonzo River in Slovenia, along a road from Bovec to the Vršič Pass, and opens up Mount Triglav in the distance. Writer Anja Mugerli among legends, suggestions and landscapes guides us to Kobarid /Caporetto. We continue with Mateja Gomboc, in the plain that leads from Caporetto to Tolmino, to Most na Soči / Santa Lucia d'Isonzo: through a stretch that today is pleasant, but that in the descent to Kanal opens up a liquid sweetness and glimpses of quiet and beauty of other times. The baton passes here to Alex Devetak, from Šempeter Vrtojba to Nova Gorica, along a fertile plain among flowers and fruits, toward the “twin” city of Gorizia, conceived and built in the aftermath of World War II. And here we are beyond the border, in Italy, where Angelo Floramo offers his video story towards Savogna d'Isonzo and Gradisca: among stories, taverns, languages spoken or dreamed. It continues with Antonella Sbuelz toward Sagrado, Gradisca and the “Bisiacaria,” to Ronchi dei Legionari, amid the echo of D'Annunzio's feat and the verses of Giuseppe Ungaretti, and the memory of countless other infantrymen, forever “young” in the trenches that swallowed them. To seal the last stretch here is a video story by writer Luigi Nacci, in Turriaco, having now reached the mouth of the river that merges into the great Adriatic, and spreads through the Park and a naturalistic oasis of rare beauty. Partners in the project are Confindustria alto Adriatico, CCIAA of Venezia Giulia, KineKasca/CineMattic and the University Consortium of Pordenone/UniPordenone.