Scholars from various RESILIENCE consortium partners got together in Campo Santo Teutonico (Vatican City) to be trained and to gather input for future trainings. On day 1 of the training seeing played an important role.
One of today’s goals of the training Religion for the Senses: How to Read, Treat and Hear Religious Sources was that the participants got an introduction into opportunities and difficulties in conducting research on religious art. The location for this was perfect: Campo Santo Teutonico, a German cemetery directly located next to the St. Peters Cathedral in Rome.
Participants were given and shown information about Campo Santo Teutonico, its origins and history and the collections it posseses. This information was presented by Dr. Albrecht Weiland and Prof. Dr. Jutta Dresken Weiland, both specialists in the field of christian archaeology. Asked for personal experiences, Albrecht Weiland shared that a training on location in object viewing has helped him a lot while doing arthistorical research on objects. Such training could also help other researchers.
Then the participants received the task to search for religious motifs in the environment themselves and explain them, aided in this by the trainers who also provided further background information.
The challenge for participants during this training is to provide feedback from two perspectives: that of a participant and that of an organizer of a future training. Fortunately, much feedback and also advice could already be gathered. These contents will later be analyzed and where necessary and possible incorporated into the future training program.
During the plenary evaluation helpful advice was shared related to seeing with this bottomline: RESILIENCE can help researchers to see beyond what they see.