Alice warned me before I set off. There are soldiers patrolling the trail to Menton, she said, who catch people trying to make their way to France unnoticed. ‘Just keep an ear out while you walk’, she said, ‘and try to stay out of trouble’. I filled up my bottle from the little spring gurgling out of the mountain side and we split up. It's a thirty-minute walk from the road where I left Alice to the next Italian village, and another ten from one end of the village's only street to the other, where the trail starts. Freshly painted hill-top houses line the main road on the right. Down the cliff on the left, dozens of ant-sized yachts float by the coast of the Italian Riviera. The boats would leave by the summer's end only to return later, along with warmth and sunscreen smells. The streets were empty when I walked across the village. Nap time. It seemed absurd to worry. And yet I wondered, not without dread, if I would see the soldiers Alice had talked about, and what would happen then.
Soldiers have been patrolling the seafront and its hinterland since late 2015, after the French government strengthened identity controls at its Italian border (del Biaggio 2020). They are part of Opération Sentinelle, a military operation deployed throughout the French territory after the 13 November attacks in Paris. On paper, Sentinelles fight against terrorism by policing France's southernmost entryways. In practice, however, they intercept unauthorised migrants treading mountain trails at night and deliver them to police officers at the police aux frontières, the border precinct. As their name suggests, Sentinelles are deployed along the Italian borderline to sense the confines of the state: they detect migrants navigating borderland landscapes with their own sensing bodies as well as technological aids, such as binoculars and microphones. While the migrants whose mobility they surveil attempt to make themselves imperceptible to avoid detection (Bonnin 2021), Sentinelles themselves are easily seen and heard. On the beach or among the sparse vegetation of the Riviera's hinterland, men in camouflage suits and combat boots do not go unnoticed.
While the mountains and valleys which separate France from Italy have long been sites of mobility (Hanus 2020; Proglio 2020; Rinauro 2009), the reinforcement of identity controls between the two countries has turned Italian bordering cities into congested bottlenecks (Aru 2021). In Ventimiglia, only a few kilometres away from France on the Italian Riviera, unauthorised migrants have been progressively pushed away from the city centre and invisibilised (Le Maquis 2017). As many migrants successfully cross the border every day or night, the spaces they temporarily occupy are rhythmed by the continuous flow of arrivals and departures. The marginalisation of unauthorised migrants in Ventimiglia has rearticulated local geographies of exile toward urban peripheries: abandoned buildings by the overpass, train tracks or grassy patches on the banks of the Roya river have become temporary shelters for many migrants in transit. Strategies to make migrants invisible in Italian cities as elsewhere in Europe contribute to figure migrants as racial others (Proglio 2020). Alterity figures here as a result of sight: migranthood is first and foremost perceived through the interpretation of visual signs, such as skin colour, clothing, posture and the display of fear or vigilance (Bachellerie 2020). In France as elsewhere, alterity is often a visual construction. Miriam Ticktin (2011) has argued for instance that humanitarian workers in France look for signs of suffering in asylum seekers to assess their chance of becoming refugees. Didier Fassin (2011) has suggested that bodies often bear visible traces of oppression, and as such can be read as archives of past persecutions. Joan Scott (2010) has shown how wearing the hijab in France made women visibly Muslim, and targeted as such. Of all the ways in which difference is made and perceived, then, sight is perhaps the most evident.
And yet alterity can also be heard, felt, smelt and tasted (Beal 2008; Hazel 2014; Jackson 2011; Schwarz 2015). Sound, in particular, has recently become a matter of anthropological attention. Steven Feld (1996), in his ethnography of the Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea, showed how people make sense of their surroundings both in and with sound. After him, radio broadcasts, cassettes, loudspeakers, recording studios, brass bands, stethoscopes and submarine sonars were examined ethnographically (Helmreich 2007; Hirschkind 2006; Larkin 2008; Meintjes 2003; Min 2020; Rice 2010; Sakakeeny 2013; Tsing 2003), feeding into expanding theories on the sonic life of people, nations and knowledge. While sight has often been depicted as a sense allowing for control and oppression (Scott 1998), as in the gaze of prison wardens, doctors, colonial officers or anthropologists, other senses are no stranger to the construction of sameness and alterity.
Exploring the role of taped sermons in the Islamic Revival movement in Cairo, Egypt, Charles Hirschkind (2006) has shown, for instance, that Islamic sermons are collective resources fostering self-improvement and pious living. Listening figures here as a means to achieve sameness rather than difference. In a different context, Tom Rice (2010) has examined how medical students in the United Kingdom learn to rely on audition rather than sight alone to examine bodies. Here again listening figures as an important way to learn and make sense of norms. The point here is not to suggest that, as a sensorial practice, listening cultivates sameness while seeing only produces difference. Rather, I am curious about the forms of alterity aurality makes possible, and how they both complement and contradict the social categories forged through sight. For subjectivation unfolds in sound as well. As musicologist Nina Eidsheim (2019) suggests, sounds and voices are inscribed, when heard, with particular markers of identity. Put differently, voices always already sound as belonging to situated subjects, depending on who speaks and who listens. What happens then when sound is upheld as evidence of alterity? What difference does sound make? What does difference sound like?
Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ventimiglia (Italy) and Briançon (France), I explore in this article the aural dimensions of policing and crossing a surveilled borderland. During these months, sound became a way of navigating the social environment of the borderland, when sight was of little use. When the no-border activists I worked with and I went out at night to cross- border trails to offer support to migrants who had hours left to walk before arriving at the next safe house, it was aural clues which most often guided us and determined what we did next. Gravel rolling down a path or twigs cracking underfoot pointed to the nearby presence of people walking. They could be the police, or they could be migrants. After some weeks, I learned to read the sounds I heard at night: voices were one way to identify who was there, depending on how loud they spoke and in what language. It also mattered how many people walked and whether their footsteps were regular. The police tended to be in pairs. That meant fewer steps. The sound of the sole of their shoes rubbing against gravel had a particular, orderly rhythm. This kind of aural attunement helped us avoid encounters with the police more than once.
Taking up Franck Billé’s (2020) call to explore the synaesthetic and sensorial side of statecraft, I attend to listening as a tool to enforce security and reproduce alterity in the confines of the state. To engage aurally with a borderland implies a certain proximity. While maps or satellite views often contribute to represent borders as immovable lines, sound makes room for borderlines to sway. Following Sentinelles, unauthorised migrants and no-border activists along transalpine trails as they listen for alterity or danger can help us understand migration, security and solidarity as they operate in and with sound. From this perspective, the making of spatial borders and social boundaries is not only visual but also mobilises the sensorium more broadly.
This essay begins by the Mediterranean coast outside the border precinct in Menton, where pushed-back migrants exchange advice about how to cross the border unnoticed. Being mobile at night is a partial cover, they suggest, as darkness only conceals one's presence visually. To be heard can also lead to detection. Making oneself unnoticeable along mountain trails at night to evade detection entails a form of sonic camouflage. I then turn to the work of volunteers in the Western Alps who rescue migrants in the mountains and bring them to a shelter where they can rest before moving on. There, I take sound as an intersubjective and sometimes unreliable tool for identification between migrants and volunteers: while shushes, whispers, footsteps and the occasional cracking twig help volunteers locate migrants in the mountain, migrants sometimes mishear volunteers’ voices as signalling police presence and danger. While rescuers have learned to listen for the presence of migrants, then, relying on sound alone as a means of identification can lead to confusion and occasionally push migrants to run away from those who intended to help them. Finally, I join no-border activists on a daytime pathfinding hike from Italy to France, during which they take turns spraying paint marks on rocks and trees. All throughout, they cover the incriminating sounds of spraying paint by exchanging loud platitudes about the weather and the view. Here sound enacts a kind of cover, a sonic façade behind which activists can engage in illicit activities. Sound, in short, contains the possibility for forgery.
Listening for the Border
I never met the soldiers Alice warned me about. After hours of alertness to murmurs and cracks, the path ended abruptly in front of a coop, home to a couple of chickens and an oversized rabbit. The sight was comforting. It meant people were close and doing mundane things, and I could take a deep breath without anyone finding the sound of it suspicious. Not that anything would have happened to me had I met Sentinelles on the trail. As a white French passport-holder, I was yet another hiker freely treading borderland trails, never knowing or needing to know whether I was already in France or still in Italy. And yet, as I later understood, making myself silent was perhaps not the soundest strategy to avoid running into police. Along cross-border trails, silence can point to guilt and loudness to innocence.
Sentinelles, for one, are usually noticeable. They patrol trails in small groups and chat with the occasional hiker, asking questions about their work. They seem to care little whether they are seen or heard. I met Fabien as he watered flowers in front of the first house after the trail. He lived there. The rabbits and chickens I had walked into minutes earlier belonged to his neighbour. We sat down on a bench in the shade of an umbrella pine tree and he told me about recent changes in the neighbourhood. He'd been living there for twenty years, far above the city, without electricity. And then a few summers earlier Sentinelles began patrolling the trail in front of his house and city employees drove up the hill in trucks filled with bags of concrete and iron poles, and within weeks installed electric cables. ‘Now there's light at night’, he said, pointing across the road to an out-of-place electric pole. Within the past five years, after identity controls resumed on the road down below, Fabien suggested, the city of Menton had cleaned up trails, fixed up roads and planted streetlamps high up in the hills so that Sentinelles could arrest migrants at night more easily. Policing figures here as a visual practice: lighting up mountain roads prevents migrants from using the night to hide and allows Sentinelles to detect unauthorised migrants in darkness almost as if in broad daylight. Visual practices are central to the perception and detection of migrants as unauthorised subjects. And yet migrant arrests are also aural events.
Sentinelles stationed outside Fabien's house sometimes keep him awake at night. From his bedroom and through his open window, he can hear footsteps on the trail before migrants come out on the main road where Sentinelles await. Soon after, Sentinelles call out to migrants and intercept them. Car doors slam, and Sentinelles drive away with migrants in the back of their car. Then the night falls silent again. Whenever this happens, Fabien says, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, he is reminded that his house now sits in the midst of surveilled territory. At night, migrant arrests manifest in sound the geographic proximity of the borderline and the state's renewed efforts to control circulation across it. Border work can be loud (Reeves 2014). It is not only space that Sentinelles territorialise, then, but also silence at night along remote trails.
To make territorial borders audible is a form of spatial striation. Deleuze and Guattari (1980) defined striation as the process through which space becomes legible. Mobility in striated spaces follows predictable paths: people move along tunnels, canals or highways. Striated space is space with a grammar. On Fabien's doorstep, striation is a small steps enterprise: a combination of decluttering, flattening and lighting up trails to foster certain itineraries over others and funnel movement along certain paths. Striating cross-border trails is not only about constraining movement in space made legible but also about making movement perceptible. Sentinelles waiting at night where the trail ends listen for shushes and footsteps as signs of migrants approaching. Streetlamps planted along the road below make migrants visible. Striation figures here as a project of audibility and visibility – an attempt to both funnel and detect movement.
This sensorial border work points to the porosity of state limits and the difficulty for authorities to enforce, in lived space, borderlines drawn on maps. Madeleine Reeves (2014) defined border work as the strategies officials deploy to fix and materialise state limits in borderland landscapes. What this implies is that states are claims rather than finished projects; that territorial integrity is an aspiration. As Tina Harris puts it, ‘there is a sense that time will bring the actual contour of the nation in line with its cartographic outline’ (2020: 86, emphasis original). Here border work is also a sensorial endeavour: Sentinelles deployed in the French–Italian borderland incarnate the state in its ability to listen and be heard. They turn formerly unpoliced stretches of land into legible and perceptible territory. The trail in front of Fabien's house has known days of imperceptibility. As Fabien described, as long as the Schengen agreements were upheld and circulation from Italy to France unpoliced, cross-border trails were of no interest to the state. They were quiet. To make space perceptible then also operates a kind of spatialisation (Foucault 1977), a governmental strategy which forges subjects within and through particular spaces. Space and subjectivity are made together: the prison harbours criminals and the asylum madmen. To be there is already to be a particular someone. Similarly, treading cross-border trails at night can signal migranthood. Visibility and audibility then allow for alterity to be made both visually and aurally along particular routes. To be noticed is already, in a way, to be caught.
Well aware of Sentinelles’ efforts to perceive and intercept them, unauthorised migrants have taken up forms of sonic vigilance to stay out of trouble. Down the cliff from Fabien's house, migrants exchange crossing tactics. They conspire, as Zacharia once put it. Zacharia is in his twenties and from Cameroon. He crossed the sea by boat and travelled to Ventimiglia by train. When we met he was out of money and had been stuck in Ventimiglia for several weeks. One day as we sat on the wall overlooking the sea with Menton on our right, Zacharia explained how collective knowledge circulates among migrants in the temporary shelters they find while stranded. On the beach or under the bridge, sometimes with smugglers, they talk about which trains were searched the day before, where on the trail the police were, and who made it across without trouble. The thing about crossing through the mountains, Zacharia said, dangling his feet, is you have to be quiet. Not only because police can hear you, but also to hear them. At night, then, migrants treading cross-border trails keep an ear out for signs of patrols.
Steven Feld coined the term ‘acoustemology’ to argue that ‘the experience of place can always be grounded in an acoustic dimension’ (1996: 97). Orienting oneself in space, he suggests, is auditory as much as visual. Whether they navigate rainforests in Papua New Guinea or mountainous borderlands between France and Italy, people make sense of where they are and where to go next based on sonic cues. Not being able to hear such cues leaves navigation to chance. Acoustemology, knowing in and with sound, amounts here to a kind of acoustic compass with which to better navigate the borderland from east to west.
Ammar once told me the story of his first crossing attempt as we drove to Ventimiglia in his car. Now a volunteer for a local non-profit, Ammar had travelled alone from Sudan five years earlier and crossed the border from Italy to France in the back of a truck before requesting asylum. Five years ago, then, he had paid a man in Italy to travel in the trunk of a car, at night. The car had stopped and from the trunk Ammar had heard footsteps getting closer and words in a foreign language. The trunk opened. Two police officers blinded him with their flashlights and drove him to the precinct where they asked for his fingerprints, which he refused to give. He was brought back to Italy. Had he known that he was in France, Ammar would have given his fingerprints and requested asylum. But he didn't know, and giving your fingerprints in Italy could lead to years of forced immobility. Ammar's story raises questions of sensorial navigation beyond sight. While he travelled in the trunk of a car not to be seen, it is his inability to interpret police voices as sonic cues about his location that ultimately led to Ammar's pushback.
Listening for as a policing strategy and a crossing tactic suggests that sounds are always already heard in a specific key. There is no such thing as a soundscape, Stefan Helmreich (2010) argued: sounds are not found or discovered, but written, or projected. People sound their environments for signs more than they perceive them (Helmreich 2015). Put differently, the sensorial is subjective in that sensing brings together particular subjects and their surrounding lifeworlds. Perception then is not only a kind of reception but also and perhaps above all a form of subjectivation. How does listening contribute to inscribe alterity in sound and what kind of subject does it forge along borderland trails?
Vocal Self, Silent Other
Interpellation can happen without a word being uttered. In her ethnography of life and care in the Canadian Arctic, Lisa Stevenson argued that ‘there are modes of listening, just like modes of speech, that can fix someone in a particular subject position’ (2014: 161). This kind of interpellation posits listening as a dialectical process through which both listeners and those they listen to are fixed into subject positions: when Sentinelles listen for migrants along cross-border trails, they listen for others and do so from the position of border enforcers; when migrants listen for police along the trails, they listen for the border and do so from the position of trespassers.
In her book, Stevenson recounts a story written by Italian novelist Italo Calvino in which a king, contemplating the effect his singing would have on those who listen, resigns himself not to sing: because he is king and known to be so, he thinks, nothing he sings can be listened to as a song. For what can a king say that is not kingly? Those who could hear him sing would still do so as the subjects, servants or relatives of a king. While naming travels one way, fixing into subject positions those being named, listening as a kind of interpellation goes back and forth: it pulls both speaker and listener into dialectics according to which the child is listened to as child, the king as king and the criminal as criminal, while those who listen do so as adults, servants and judges.
The reproduction of alterity through sound can be heard in the French–Italian borderland whenever migrants interact with locals, in the rising intonation of volunteers asking questions in emergency shelters, the enunciation of house rules and mealtimes, and the rescue operations in which they engage every night during the winter. These sounds often contrast with the few words migrants utter or the silences they answer questions with. Police or not, French people tend to sound the same to migrants. Being interpellated, questioned, asked to fill out and sign forms, taken places and told what to do are experiences which occur at border precincts and shelters alike.
Volunteers working in emergency shelters and no-border activists operating in the borderland rely on questions and notes to help migrants reach their desired destination. Sitting on a small wall overlooking the sea, outside of the border precinct in Menton, Stefan records in a brown notebook the number of people pushed back by French police officers every day. Stefan belongs to a small collective of no-border activists which advocates against illegal pushbacks and police brutality against migrants in the French–Italian borderland. Until 2017, Stefan, Alice and their friends worked in refugee camps in Grande-Synthe, in Northern France, where migrants attempt to cross to the United Kingdom. When the camps burned down they decided to relocate to the Riviera, where police repression was rising and few activists were to be found to witness and denounce potential abuses. Tourism and right-wing politics make the area particularly hostile to migrants. Sitting on the side of the road which connects Menton to Ventimiglia, Stefan writes down in his notebook the time at which migrants are let go from the precinct, their gender, the country they come from if he knows – the general area he assumes they come from if he does not – as well as testimonies of police brutality. He keeps track of all this to write the newsletter he publishes every month about the situation at the border, but also because the funding he and his friends receive from local non-profits is contingent on them collecting information from migrants. One entry reads: ‘11:30. Mr. Z has a residence permit in Italy, valid until 2030. He travels for work regularly to France, Belgium, Netherlands. Regularly crosses the border without problem. Last night he was with his cousin in a car on the highway. Police arrested him. He shows his residence permit. The policeman acts like there is nothing he can do. Mr. Z is taken to the border precinct. Let go this morning at 10:30’. Most entries are not as detailed as this one. The information they record leans toward anonymity. One of them reads: ‘9:19. 1 (Afghani). 9:25. 3 (2 from Nigeria). 9:30. 2. 10:00. 4. 10:25. Bus followed by pigs [police] didn't stop . . . 11:00. 3 (Bangladesh) train at night. 11:01. 3 Maghreb’. While Stefan gathers information about pushed-back migrants with the intent to expose police violence in the margins of the state, he does so with the help of the very categories which state officers use to set apart, on paper, illegitimate migrants from legitimate refugees.
There is a shelter up north in the High Alps where the recording of migrants’ information is of utmost priority. The shelter is run by volunteers and a few employees who operate out of former police barracks. As they arrive at the shelter late at night or early in the morning, migrants get to sit down and eat before getting a bed in a crowded dorm-room and going to sleep. On the following day, they must stop by the reception, a room on the first floor the size of a small classroom with tables and chairs all facing forward, to fill out some forms. The reception volunteer hands them out and gives instructions in French and English. Migrants are asked for their name, date of birth, country of origin, potential health problems, desired destination, possible contacts and the amount of money they carry with them. Sophie, the volunteer coordinator at the shelter, told me that the forms had recently been updated; that the new ones would soon be in circulation. More information was to be recorded.
We sat at a table outside the shelter and Sophie showed me the new form. It had a section for itineraries, asking migrants to tick the box which best indicated the route they had taken before landing here. If you crossed the Mediterranean to Italy tick the first box, if you crossed the Mediterranean to Greece tick the second one, if you walked through the Balkans tick the third one, and so on. Migrants filled the forms in silence or asked others for help with translation. Hospitality here adopts some of the norms and logics of state questioning. It is in the habit of recording information, in the handed-out forms and the questions asked and in the exhortations for truth and identity that the state is invoked. ‘The stranger’, Derrida writes, ‘is a person whose name is asked before being welcomed; enjoined to state and swear their identity, like a witness in court’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 1997: 31). The connection between hospitality and hostility is tenuous. Asking and answering questions here fosters a particular dialectic, one which opposes citizens asking questions to the migrants who answer them. That dialectic is visual – forms being handed out, migrants being showed where to go – but not visual only. It also circulates in sound, in the particular way volunteers listen to migrant stories, the questions they ask, the advice they give and the threats they proffer if migrants were to break the rules of collective life. Collecting information then operates a kind of interpellation, assigning both asking citizens and asked migrants to particular subject positions.
In the winter, volunteers set out every night to find migrants along mountain paths. I went hiking with some of them one summer day, along a trail which migrants used to take. We drove from the shelter and stopped before the mountain pass which connects France to Italy. We walked across the pass all the way to the unmarked borderline and stopped at the entrance of a tunnel on the edge of a steep cliff looking out on the valley below. We stopped, and Michel, a retired mountain guide and volunteer at the shelter, explained: from November to April, he said, the trail we just walked along is buried under a thick layer of snow. Temperatures dip way below freezing. Most migrants have picked up boots and winter coats in Italy before crossing, but some of them still attempt to cross the mountain in worn-out shoes and light shirts. They walk in the tunnel in pitch-black obscurity without knowing that the cliff is right behind. Migrants have died, Michel recalled, running off the cliff as they attempted to escape police, or rescuers they thought were police.
Foes and allies, Michel suggested, sometimes sound the same. Volunteer rescuers pace up and down mountain trails at night with cookies and thermoses filled with hot tea, with gloves, socks, coats and hats they hope will help the migrants they encounter along trails. Every night, high up in the mountains, they keep an ear out for shushes and whispers; for muffled footsteps in the snow and cracking twigs. When they hear something, they say salaam, and explain in English and in French that they are here to help; that they have supplies and hot tea. For migrants, unable to see whether those who speak are wearing uniforms or winter hats, carrying weapons or hiking sticks, interpellation can trigger flight. More than once, Michel said, frowning behind his small round glasses, he had heard people run away after he had announced himself. Migrants running away from rescuers point to a kind of sensorial confusion: sound without sight can lead people to misidentify who is speaking. Put differently, identification in sound is uncertain. Hearing, as much as speaking, crafts particular subjects.
Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation is helpful to consider the way identities are formed and fixed through auditory experiences, such as hailing, listening or hearing. In Louis Althusser's (1971) famous example, a police officer shouts ‘hey, you!’ and those who turn around are identified as subjects of the state. Unlike the officer in Althusser's story, rescuers in the High Alps do not walk around shouting ‘hey, you!’ Instead, they announce themselves, in multiple languages, and offer support. Their speech is meant to signal safety without any assurance that the signal will be picked up as such by migrants. Rescuers can be misheard and misidentified, matched on the basis of their voice with subject positions they do not otherwise occupy.
These are stories about the way subjects attempt to forge themselves and others through vocal and aural practices, and how they sometimes fail; stories about sound as a potent and yet unreliable matter with which to create differences. At stake in the gap between speech and hearing is the possibility for sonic deception; for unauthorised practices to be crafted as legitimate and misheard as such; for vocal enactments to conceal illegality.
Sonic Signatures
If the state's signature can be forged, its authority circulated and appropriated through imitation (Das 2004), so can particular subject positions be invoked through vocal enactments. I use the term sonic signature in this section to suggest that alterity as heard and listened for leaves room for the possibility of forgery.
I met Carlo, Mathilde and her boyfriend Sam one morning after I left the emergency shelter and jumped on a cross-border bus to Italy. They lived in a squatted house which belonged to the municipality but had been abandoned for decades. In 2017, activists had forced the door open and began using the building to host migrants on their way to France. Carlo walked the trail every other week to paint new marks in the mountains or paint over fading ones. There are marks on the ground, on rocks and on tree trunks: fluorescent dots and arrows; each colour marking its own path from departure to arrival. Heavy snowfalls in the winter and landslides in the summer make for ever-changing landscapes and possibilities for crossing. Carlo is a permanent resident at the squatted house, albeit always expecting the day the police will evict him and his friends. Mathilde and Sam both live in Lyon (France) but stay in Italy during their annual month off work. In France, they both work nine-to-five jobs at local non-profits. We stuffed our backpacks with cans of spray paint and water bottles, drove up to the nearest village and left the car in an empty parking lot not far from where the trail starts. Tourists in expensive-looking hiking gear were enjoying the weather. We hiked uphill until there was no one around and stopped to catch our breath. From a clearing in the forest we looked down on scattered groups of people moving across the pristine hills of a brand-new golf course, jumping in and out of carts, speeding across the bright green grass. It was midday. Up here the mountain was quiet.
Carlo took his backpack off. He pulled a spray can out and gestured toward a rock nearby. It all felt very still and solemn. But then Mathilde and Sam started commenting loudly on the surrounding flora and fauna, and the spell fizzled out. And how magnificent the trees, they insisted, and how gorgeous the weather, and did you notice the bird high up on that branch? What a wonderful day it was to go hiking. I could barely hear, below the romantic nature rants, the gargles and hisses of paint being sprayed on a rock nearby. The same scene occurred again and again as we kept walking: at forks on the trail and on the metallic legs of ski lifts as we crossed grassy Olympic slopes. We took turns exchanging loud platitudes and spraying. After eight hours of hiking, I had become accustomed to the sudden shifts in tone. It was only after we reached the emergency shelter, however, when my knees had melted and my feet lithified, that Carlo explained why the nature talk. The police are listening, he said. The mountains have ears. Sam asked if we could skip the riddles. There are microphones along the trail, Carlo explained: microphones in the trees, underneath rocks, on the ski lifts dangling above our heads when we climbed the treeless slopes. And at the border precinct down below, there is a police officer listening. Each microphone has coordinates, Marco continued, and it is relatively easy for police tipped by shushes and cracking branches to locate migrants in the mountain and intercept them at the end of the trail. Whether microphones really peppered transalpine trails, I never found out. Yet the possibility of them being there was enough to evoke a kind of sonic vigilance and cause activists to enact their own innocence in sound through the expression of platitudes, of things tourists could have said.
Nature talk figures here as a vocal performance of good citizenship – a signature behind which activists engage in illicit activities. Here again aurality adds to the sensorial dimension of border enforcement and its contestation: while the fluorescent arrows activists paint on rocks, trees and metallic poles point to the importance of visual signals to guide unauthorised migrants across mountain trails, sound allows for manipulation and the construction of misidentification. Put differently, forgery allows for the unauthorised to unfold under cover of normalcy, for guilt to be misheard as innocence.
Conclusion
The reinforcement of identity controls and deployment of police forces along the territorial border between France and Italy have led unauthorised migrants to cross the border along increasingly dangerous routes: excluded from roads and railroads, many attempt to enter France unnoticed by walking along cross- border trails at night (Garelli and Tazzioli 2022), often ill-equipped and without really knowing where to go. If the night allows migrants to partially conceal themselves from patrolling officers by making sight unusable as a sense for identification and control, there are other senses as play in the making and unmaking of territorial borders. In this article, I explored borderwork as it unravels in sound, through oral and aural practices. Following no-border activists, mountain rescuers, police officers and unauthorised migrants as they navigate borderland landscapes by ear, I tried to show that the construction of spatial and social divisions is more than a visual endeavour grounded in cartography and the identification of migrants through blackness and physical signs of exhaustion. I examined hearing as a sense for navigation and subjectivation. Sound makes a difference here in the separation it operates between those who can risk being loud and those who can't: silence comes to signal unauthorised migranthood while loudness gestures toward social legitimacy. If Sentinelles, shelter volunteers and mountain rescuers actively make themselves perceptible to inscribe state limits in space, gather migrant information or offer support respectively, for unauthorised migrants perceptibility often equates to capture and exclusion. To be quiet then is to attempt a form of sonic camouflage. Sound figures here as more imperfect and more malleable than sight when it comes to identification. Mountain guides going on rescue expeditions at night are sometimes misheard by migrants who, upon hearing them, mistake them for police and run away. While mishearing can lead to dramatic misidentifications, sound's malleability can lead to fruitful deceptions. No-border activists fostering migrant mobility in the mountains imitate tourist speech as an enactment of good citizenship behind which to engage in illicit activities. Sound allows here for creative forgeries, for the muddling of identity and identification.
Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the people who shared snippets of their lives with me while they were on the road, the support of various no-border collectives and organisations in both France and Italy, the time and kindness of my dissertation advisers, the helpful comments from anonymous reviewers, and funding from the Council for European Studies.
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