As part of my UNESCO-WHIPIC Fellowship research in South Korea, I undertook several field visits that gradually shaped the methodological foundations of SNIP. One of these early and important moments came through a visit to two abandoned gongsos in Andong—Doyang Gongso and Daejuk Gongso, alongside UNESCO colleagues, within a broader process of field observation, digital documentation, and critical reflection on heritage interpretation.

At first, the task seemed relatively clear. Through photogrammetry, close observation, and fragments of archival and site-based information, these places could be documented with care. Their architectural details, material conditions, and visible traces of historical significance remained accessible. Doyang Gongso, remembered here as the “Pumpkin Church,” carried a quiet sense of ecological reclamation and devotional residue; Daejuk Gongso, standing beside the cabbage field, conveyed a more deliberate atmosphere of closure, severance, and social withdrawal. Even in abandonment, both sites held an undeniable gravity. They felt important.

Yet that importance was not easily knowable.

The more I tried to understand these gongsos, the more I encountered a deeper interpretive problem. As someone coming from outside as in geographically, culturally, and socially, I could observe, record, and reconstruct the physical fabric, but I could not fully access the community associations, lived memories, and spatial narratives that once animated these places. The buildings remained, but the social worlds that had given them meaning had already receded. Even with UNESCO colleagues beside me, and despite our shared commitment to heritage work, much about these sites remained beyond immediate explanation. We could register their significance, but we could not fully hear it.

That experience became especially important because it exposed a distinction that would later become central to my thinking: to document a place is not the same as to interpret its heritage. The gongsos could still be modelled, measured, and visually analysed. Their textures of decay, devotional objects, thresholds, interiors, and remnants of use could all be captured. But what could not be recovered so easily were the stories of attachment, the everyday patterns of use, the local memories, and the subtle community meanings that once made these buildings socially alive.

In that sense, the Andong visit became more than a field exercise within the fellowship. It became a methodological precursor. It forced me to confront the limits of documentation when heritage has outlived its people, or when the physical structure survives after the continuity of communal narration has already thinned out. The question was no longer only about how to record architecture better. It was about whether heritage interpretation can ever be adequate if it remains dependent on physical record alone.

This tension stayed with me. Later visits to other gongsos with living communities would shift the problem again, revealing what becomes possible when memory, voice, and community narration are still present. But in Andong, the challenge appeared in its starkest form: what happens when a place still stands, but the meanings that once moved through it are no longer readily accessible?

From that encounter emerged a critical question that would become foundational to SNIP: How can heritage documentation interpret a place when community memory, lived associations, and spatial narratives have already disappeared?