From Thursday 27th November to Tuesday 9th December 2025, the Gorizia Campus library of the University of Trieste hosts the travelling exhibition The Garden of the (In)visibles, an international project that invites us to look at European borders as places of stories, passages and rights. 

The set-up stems from the collaboration between the University of Trieste and the Primorska University of Koper (Slovenia), which was launched as part of the Transform4Europe University Alliance: a joint work that exposes objects abandoned by people moving along the routes between Croatia, Slovenia and Italy and transforms them into traces of a shared European heritage.

The project takes the form of field research activities conducted jointly by professors, researchers and students of the two universities. The objects collected along the migratory paths are goods of daily use necessary for eating, sleeping, covering or caring, but also elements related to the intimate and spiritual sphere. Snatched away from the invisibility they are often surrounded by, these materials are recontextualised as ‘talking artifacts’: small physical elements that refer to identities, memories and belongings, opening a bridge between material heritage and intangible heritage, between what remains and the lives that have gone through it.

‘Ourtask as a university, as researchers, as students is above all to stimulate social but also political reflection on what is happening at European borders, not only in our own country, with regard to migratory mobility,’ emphasises Professor Roberta Altin, UniTS Rector’s Delegate for Development Cooperation and scientific coordinator of the exhibition. 

The Garden of the (In)visibles not only exhibitssome objects, but questions visitors and institutions about the materiality of a phenomenon that might remain abstract and calls for a responsible look at what is happening at Europe’s borders.

Conceived as T4E’s Common Cultural Activity of Work Package 7 (Common Heritage & Multilingualism), the exhibition is an evolving project that, step by step, is enriched with local contributions, artistic installations, oral stories and moments of public debate. After its debut at the University of Saarland, the exhibition will cover a total of seven out of ten T4E universities, including Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Portugal, Bulgaria, Spain and Poland. The Gorizia stage has a particularly symbolic value because it brings the project back to the border from which it started, rooting the European dialogue in the territory that inspired it.

The opening is scheduled for Thursday 27th November at 17:00 in the Gorizia Campus library of the University of Trieste (via Alviano 18, first floor). Prof. Roberta Altin from UniTS, Prof. Katja Hrobat Virloget from Primorska University, Prof. Jure Gombač from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Giuseppe Grimaldi of the University of Trieste. The event will also be actively attended by students from UniTS, UP and Collegio Fonda; The ‘Fonda for Others’ working group will gather visitors’ impressions and reflections during the visit.

The exhibition will be open and freely accessible until 9th December 2025. The library will be open from Monday to Thursday from 9:00 to 18.30 and on Fridays from 9:00 to 13:00; the venue will be closed on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

The exhibition will end with a T4EU International Conference entitled ‘Standing up for Higher Education in Times of Global Crises’, scheduled for Tuesday 9th December 2025 at 15:00 in the Main Hall of the Gorizia Campus (via Alviano 18).

For information about the project and the exhibition: t4eu.heritage@units.it.