Across the globe, heritage sites are not preserved solely through policies or monuments; they endure through ritual, longing, and lived emotional connection.
Event details
Time: 8:30-10:00am WIB // 12:30-2:00pm AEDT
Join in-person: McDonald Room, Menzies library, ANU
Join online: bit.ly/ISG_indonesiaproject
About the seminar
Across the globe, heritage sites are not preserved solely through policies or monuments; they endure through ritual, longing, and lived emotional connection. This paper explores how spaces imbued with memory, blessing, and spiritual continuity challenge formal heritage and urban planning systems rooted in materiality, regulation, and state control. It examines how acts of ziyarah (pilgrimage) and haul (commemoration) sustain sacred cultural landscapes that resist rationalized interventions and colonial logics of space. Building on critiques of authorized heritage discourse and expanding beyond Western-centric understandings of space, the paper proposes the Landscape of Emotion and Memory as a conceptual framework for negotiating tensions between technocratic planning and humanities-informed interpretations of sacred urban landscapes. Sacred Islamic graveyards are examined as emotional landscapes that defy linear historicism. This research identifies and analyses three critical types of boundary negotiation observed within emotional landscapes: crossing disciplinary boundaries to recognize memory and ritual as legitimate urban knowledge; carefully navigating epistemological divides between technical data and lived experience; and respecting spiritual boundaries.
Event Speakers
Karina Tucunan
Karina is currently a PhD Student at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, ANU. Her research explores Islamic Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL) in Indonesia through The Earth Remembers paradigm, which situates memory, emotion, and heritage as active forces shaping urban form and identity.