Heritage_lab is a research and education platform within OMBEiK, which organises and carries out scholarly and popularisation activities concerning the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean region, including the role of cultural clichés, heritage sites and sensory heritage, with particular emphasis on the heritage of ancient Greece.
The organisational structure of the platform comprises the coordinator Sebastian Borowicz, and members of OMBEiK. Heritage_lab is an open formula and external educational, research and museum entities are welcome to join. The aim is to create the broadest possible active forum for transdisciplinary community cooperation, exchange of experience, knowledge and ideas related to the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean region from antiquity to modern times. One of the objectives of Heritage_lab is to organise and carry out educational and promotional activities related to all aspects of European cultural heritage, literary, intellectual and material.
Heritage_lab is currently cooperating with the Polish Archaeological Institute at Athens, the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, the Faculty of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, the Progressive Arts Institute Foundation (Pl. Fundacją Instytut Sztuk Progresywnych) and the Zygmunt Mineyka Polish School at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Athens.
Activities undertaken as part of Heritage_lab:
- participation in the international conference titled: Scales of Social Environmental & Cultural Change in Past Societies, 13-18 March 2023, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Presentation: Man and things: Kinesics and proxemics in the process of perception of objects in the archaic Greek culture (Sebastian Borowicz);
- participation in the international conference titled: The Constant Participant: Constructing and Affirming Identity through Material Culture in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries and Modern Museums, held in Athens from the 8th to the 10th of May 2024. Presentation titled: Unveiling the Non-material Heritage: The Early Iron Age Greek Sensorimotor Model and Its Significance for Contemporary Heritage Studies (Sebastian Borowicz);
- organisation of the international scientific session: Les poétiques sympotiques de l’antiquité à nos jours, OMBEiK & PIAA, Athens, October 2023 (Joanna Hobot-Marcinek, Sebastian Borowicz);
- co-editing a special issue of Annals of Arts (Pl. Roczniki Humanistyczne), a Classical Language Studies notebook with materials from the session: Les poétiques sympotiques – Sympotic poetics (Sebastian Borowicz). The issue is scheduled for publication in 2024;
- research stay at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), 2022, (Sebastian Borowicz, Visiting Senior Associate Member);
- research stay at the British School at Athens. Institute for Advanced Research (BSA), 2022, (Sebastian Borowicz, Full Senior Member);
- research stay at the Knossos Research Centre, BSA, 2022, (Sebastian Borowicz, Full Senior Member);
- research stay at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2022, Sebastian Borowicz.
Research projects related to activities of Heritage_lab:
Analysis of visual culture elements of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean culture, National Science Centre grant (2021-2022).
The educational function of heritage sites in the workshop of a contemporary Polish Studies scholar, ID UB grant (2022).
Sympotic poetics – from Antiquity to the present day (2023).
Members of Heritage_lab conducted also the following scientific research projects:
Anus ebria et delirans in European culture (Middle Ages – 19th century), National Science Centre grant carried out 2013-2016
The Dionysian Lady and the phantasmagoria of death. Semiotic space of old age and intoxication in Polish contemporary literature, Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education grant carried out in 2006-2009.
We would also like to invite you to follow our fan page with interesting facts about the cultural cliché of anus ebria et delirans and our research concerning it (click on the image).
Redrawing of a painting by Petrus Staverenus (1615-1660) An old woman drinking from a wine glass by Paulina Antolak
Sensory heritage
Studies on human sensory heritage are within a group of domains currently attracting the greatest interest in the humanities. Among others, they concern the issue of perception of space, vision and movement; the emergence, functioning and cultivation of specific perceptual-motor models and, what is important, their significance for the interpretation of sources. The emphasis is put on the fundamental role of body movement and gesture in acts of perception, which are always shaped in a specific socio-cultural environment. Consequently, the sensorimotor model constitutes part of a cultural order based on learned socio-behavioural patterns transmitted through kinaesthetic actions, such as, for example, specific habits and tactics for moving around in the surrounding environment, perceiving objects in it (people, animals, phenomena, landscape elements, buildings), positioning oneself in relation to them and reacting to their presence. These components were developed and transmitted not only as a result of direct human interaction, but also through manufactured things, such as paintings requiring knowledge of specific reception strategies and the application of relevant knowledge available through elaborate mnemonic practices (epic). Human creations thus perpetuated the proxemics and kinesics inherent in the social life of the time by playing an important role in the process of sustaining and transmitting sensorimotor models. For us, in turn, these monuments are primary sources for drawing inferences about the past.
Although the study of perception and motor skills in ancient cultures is currently rapidly developing, the perception of archaic man is rarely considered in the context of cultural mechanisms related to the transmission of specific traditions, patterns and sensorimotor habits and their consequences for the interpretation process. The way of moving (processional walking vs. sneaking), determining one’s position (e.g. by looking for a place with a view and locating buildings/objects in space), directions (left and right), and finally the very act of looking (looking out, observing vs. deliberately making something visible or hiding it) are gestures with certain cultural values and they are associated with social life. At the same time, the physical manifestations of these activities have a biological, neurophysiological basis related to, among other things, the ability to situate oneself in space, bodily self-awareness and embodied simulation. Cognitive research emphasises the role of multisensory integration and somatosensory and viscero-motor representations, which has important implications for research into the synesthetic, transmedial dimension of perception. Research in developmental psychology is also highly relevant here. According to Jerome Bruner, so-called enactive representations are one of the basic methods of learning about the world and building knowledge about it precisely through motor actions. Kinesthesia, human movement and the accompanying acts of sensory perception are therefore complex issues that require going beyond cultural anthropology. Moreover, the aforementioned activities are components of cultural heritage as much as things, paintings, architecture and manifestations of so-called higher mental functions, such as epic poems and hymns. Sensory heritage here constitutes an area of cultural research parallel to material and mental heritage, which makes it possible to broaden the interpretation with a so-called thick description.
Heritage sites
one of three modules of multimodal Polish Studies developed at OMBEiK is called Heritage sites. Its aim is to use advanced technologies and heritage sites to build a new type of interpretative competence for pupils and students who are currently embedded in technotopias and networked digital environments. Combining sensory probes, VR goggles, location-based media with real cultural environments intends to enable participants to go beyond the traditional interpretative practices inherent in monomedia literature, to build new cognitive competences based on immersivity and so-called network art objects. These activities are realised, among other things, through strategies of situationist drift, transurbation, embodied simulation, analysis of documentation/objects in galleries (non-site) and their juxtaposition with the heritage site, cybercartographies, elements of gamification (missions) and essayistic meta-statements and photo-essays about heritage sites specific to land art practices. In the embodied reception of heritage sites, during the walks (drifts) the students make use of cartographic imagination, participatory mapping, bio mapping, emotional landscapes and neogeography. Thus, the drift in the form of a walk involves, among other things, new ways of combining theoretical knowledge (commentary) with knowledge produced on the spot, i.e. as a result of emerging questions, discourses, embodied being, digitally mediated being, mapped and networked being. Such an experimental model of knowledge production is already present in a hybrid system composed of human and non-human actors, the organic world, a communicative component, the electromagnetic spectrum and technical objects; it thus creates, as Henri Lefebvre would have said, “a situation, a moment that is new, surprising and endowed with a creative context”. The reception strategies born in the course of such drifts, which are de facto the construction of a critical instrumentarium of a new type, can then be used by pupils and students in their reinterpretations of traditional monomedia literary works – great books.
