This action, which is at its beginnings, aims at offering to young European students a framework to relate to the texts of European intellectuals permanently placed on the Bridge of Europe (Pont de l'Europe).

These texts, to which young people are brought to react, are approached as a symbolic place of the memory of the borders and of otherness.

bridges of europe. places of memory and intercultural dialogue.

The action "Writing the Frontiers" undertook by the European Institute of Cultural Routes together with European school establishments aims at prolonging the symbolic literary enterprise represented by the "Bridge of Europe" towards other places of European memory and at sensitising young Europeans to the questions of restoring intercultural dialogue between populations separated by borders in the recent history of Europe.

The action will be based primarily on school networks, already sensitised, thanks to tri-national meetings organised by the Centre of European Culture in Saint-Jean d'Angély (and other Centres), to questions concerning European citizenship, the ethical sources of European construction and of the meeting of cultures. Special attention will be paid to the establishments located in transborder territories, to those located in cities or areas crossed by rivers or large rivers that separated different areas and cultures, even conditioned the establishment of socially different districts, etc.

an experimental year

During the school year, it would be a question of making a first experiment with six school establishments from all over Europe in order to launch the enterprise, to test a methodology and to install the tools for approach and sensitising.

In parallel, the Institute will seek, together with the establishments already concerned and with others to come, to set up a school network that will prepare a two-year European program whose principal financing could come from COMENIUS II. This implies that the school establishments concerned make contact among them and that teachers meet during a preparatory visit.

final step

During the school year, the pupils will work on the texts in co-ordination with the professors most concerned (literature, languages, philosophy, history, visual arts, music...). This phase should for allow a multidisciplinary exploitation of these texts, including a literary and linguistic point of view, as well as the point of view of European citizenship, European history and memory. The work should be translated in the form of written reactions and correspondence directed to the authors charged by the Institute with the responsibility to transmit this work. The Institute will be able to place at the disposal of the establishments bibliographical reference and press kits on the authors.

Always during the same school year, but with the possibility of extension to the following school year, the pupils will have to choose one of these texts (and of these authors) which will best correspond to the historical, geographical and social situation of their city. They will discuss initially by mail with the author chosen, who will then be invited for two days to their school and to the public library of their city.

For this occasion, they will prepare an exhibition (in the form of panels), which will later be added to a road show presenting the entire enterprise, also intended for the general public.

One of the numerous texts produced by the pupils.

The pupils will also seek in the geographical proximity of their establishment a place of memory of Europe where the text of their choice will be permanently placed. This work will give the opportunity for comprehensive research on the concept of place of memory, on the symbolism of European values, on the concrete installation of an inscription (legal, procedural and practical aspects, contacts with territorial communities...), etc.

At the end of this two-years work, the partial exhibitions will be joined in Luxembourg for an evaluation seminar and will then be proposed for exhibition in the two capitals of Europe: Brussels and Strasbourg, as well as in the various Centres of European culture. A meeting between pupils in the form of an itinerant voyage to several significant memorials of Europe will also be prepared.

The anticipated results are a concrete sensitising to the European values of interculturality, to tolerance and cultural dialogue, of both the young and the adult public; knowledge of the European intellectuals; a production of reflective texts; concrete knowledge of the places of memory of Europe, all of which falls under the action of European citizenship.

Some of the already written texts are in the database.