SPACE AS A MEDIUM OF RELIGION

The relationship between space, as place and as experience, and religion is a common theme across a number of projects within our research group that consider material and architectural references to religion in public space. The travel motif in films, images and text has been explored as an expression of transformations that are strongly tied to existential experience: whether understood as pilgrimage, adventuring, or tourism, travels not only connects different places but can also contain implicit or explicit references to religious tradition and forms complex processes of identity. This considerable presence of spatial practices in identity-making processes is also recognised in other research projects, for example, in the examination of the representation of religious diversity in museums, interreligious chapels or buildings, and other public places.