SNIP: Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol

The conventional frameworks of heritage interpretation often operate on an unexamined assumption that meaning resides in fabric, awaiting extraction. As heritage professionals, we document, we model, we interpret. Each act subtly reinforcing the position that heritage is object rather than relation, it is noun rather than verb.

My three months fellowship research at UNESCO-WHIPIC and across various Korean heritage sites pressed against this assumption. Not gently. Churches that are no longer in active use I found yet dense with significance. Elderly caretakers' living memories constitute the site no less than any masonry.  There is this persistent dissonance between what institutional frameworks preserve and what communities actually carry.

What I became the outcome of this research as a UNESCO fellow is not correction but extension. As 'photogrammetry' already captures geometry, it can also open conversation and dialouge. And documentation already records, it can also invite for co-creation. The tools are ready, the orientation is what shifts.

Heritage, I have come to understand, is fundamentally relational! This is not just a theoretical preference. It is an empirical observation with consequences we have barely begun to confront! Institutions have built the scaffolding! The work now is to inhabit it differently, to let communities not only receive interpretation but constitute it!