1st International Seminar *
Architectures of the Soul
The Construction of the Badlands in and out of the City
16 November | 9am
Aud. Afonso de Barros
Free admission with registration
The search for the wilderness as a space and possibility of a more radical religious experience accompanies and marks the development of Western culture, in the multiple possibilities that it has closed from the earliest moment, from voluntary seclusion or eremitic life to the setting of solitary life in more communitarian ways. The search for solitude and eremitism remained and marked the main moments of crisis and renewal of the Western world throughout the Middle Ages and even in the dawn of Modernity. This phenomenon also left a considerable amount of testimony in Portugal, from the hermits of the XI and XII centuries studied by José Mattoso to the hermit movement around the community of São Paulo de Serra de Ossa, already in the late fourteenth century, or the walled or and later, the beatas or beguinas that flourish in the interior or in the environs of the cities. All of them influenced and accompanied both the development of the city and the peri-urban landscape, with a particular importance in the transformation of territorially more isolated or peripheral areas.
The 1st International Seminar Architectures of the Soul: Building the Badlands in and out of the City aims to promote scientific study and discussion around the architecture associated with spiritual practices centered on the search for the wilderness and the experience of solitude. Both a multidisciplinary approach, between the different knowledges and looks - between history, architecture, landscape architecture, the study of cultural heritage, art history, among others - will be privileged as a comparative perspective, from similar studies conducted in other geographies of the southern Mediterranean.
Thematic Areas:
- Spiritual experiences inside and outside the city
- Spatialities of eremitism
- The digital survey as an instrument of analysis of the
- The safeguarding and creation of (new) materialities
* Integrated in the doctoral research of Rolando Volzone (DINÂMIA'CET - ISCTE-IUL), on Architectures of the Soul. Proposal of Valorization of the Architecture and Eremic Landscape in the Alentejo of the XII-XVI centuries financed by FCT (SFRH / BD / 111796/2015)