After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new cultural and political identities emerged in Central and East Europe. Other spaces, other identities, and other boundaries have been created: the cartography of those regions has greatly changed. These spaces do not take the stable form of impassable borders (although new nationalisms and new open or underground conflicts have emerged), but they have been configured as an archipelago of multiple and complex relations, that sometimes involve demarcations between "Self" and "Stranger", sometimes implies inclusions that accept the "other". And some of these communities do not have a precise territorial location, but are dispersed in various states. Both the areas with a strong political-cultural identity, and the areas characterized by "threshold" and heterotopy generated important artistic and cultural products in the last 25 years. The research project, which plans a multi-year development and has an interdisciplinary character, is articulated by phases: the first one consists in identifying, in a kind of 'cultural cartography' , these other spaces that go beyond the territories organized as states, and in identifying (at first, in the areas of German, Russian, Polish, Romanian and Czech languages) cultural phenomena that characterize this trend, as well as themes, motives, expressions, common elements of this artistic production. The research group in addition to a philological methodology, will use an intercultural comparative method, since the products do not only invest different (but closely connected) languages and areas, but they are also of different artistic typology. The research group aims to organize one or more international conferences on the subject, to present the results of the research in one or more books, to create a website to publish the partial results of the research, to organize a seminar (open to the PhD students and school teachers) to test the impact of the research results on teaching activity.
