New Approaches to Cultural Heritage on Ways to Santiago : the Experimental Project Migrating Art Historians
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The contemporary renewal of the interest in the pilgrimage to Santiago and the associated revitalization of the French pilgrimage routes opened to new approaches in the scientific study of monuments and the understanding of this phenomenon. One of the new approaches, suggested by the international experimental project Migrating Art Historians, is based on the study of objects and monuments through their direct encounter via the movement of walking bodies. This methodology raised new questions for the scientific research but also for the mediation to the broader public. At the core of the project is the idea of returning the importance of the perception of monuments during pilgrimage to the scholarly discussion. The project argues that the pilgrim’s body was a living medium capable to integrate, remember, share and carry with him images, visual and synesthetic experiences. The questions asked come on the one hand from the confrontation of the participants with the monuments, on the other hand from the framing of these monuments within the new interdisciplinary impulses of the discipline of art history. The topics opened and reconsidered within this approach thus include the meeting of monuments in the distance, the slow approach towards them, the orientation and visual markers on the pilgrimage ways, as well as the various issues on perception and mediation of the preserved cultural heritage. Moreover, the project offered new inputs to reconsider some historiographical myths regarding, for instance, the repetition of the iconographical schemes on the churches tympana. In the frame of this conference, I would like to present and address specifically the innovative approach of the project Migrating Art Historians. Both for scientific results and issues of mediation, this new methodological approach is of considerable significance in the discussion of the cultural heritage on the pilgrimage routes. As was assessed during the project, mediation to a wider audience is indeed a key not only to obtain a more global image of the phenomenon, but also to provide an essential link between the historical past and the present. |