September – December 2025 | Sejong, South Korea

What happens when a heritage researcher from South Asia encounters Korean heritage not as a tourist, but as an interlocutor? This short visual narrative documents three months of fieldwork, contemplation, and methodological development at the UNESCO World Heritage Interpretation and Presentation Information Centre.

The work began with documents, synthesizing WHIPIC's publications, interrogating interpretation frameworks, consulting with experts. But heritage, as this journey reveals, refuses to stay on paper. It lives in the relations that carry memory, attachment and histories. In the abandoned churches of rural Korea where decay becomes its own form of testimony. In the dissonance between official narratives and lived experience.

Seven World Heritage Sites. Countless hours of documentation. But the real archive assembled here is one of encounters: conversations over banchans that became theoretical breakthroughs, technical failures that posed philosophical questions, and the persistent recognition that heritage interpretation is never about objects; it is always, fundamentally, about people.

This fellowship shaped the foundations of SNIP (Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol), a methodology for polyphonic heritage interpretation that emerged from these dialogues between South Asian practice and Korean contexts. The work continues.

감사합니다.