Un atelier organisé au sein du projet TANDEM mené dans le cadre du programme Tandem CNRS / UK développé par l’Université Charles, le CNRS et le CEFRES.

Date : 21–22 septembre 2026
Lieu : CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 et en ligne (pour obtenir le lien, veuillez écrire à cefres@cefres.cz)
Langue : anglais

Présentation

Research on the agency of religious buildings in Europe has expanded considerably over the past two decades, yet it remains fragmented along disciplinary, regional, and confessional lines. While theology, architecture, real estate studies, sociology, art history, and anthropology all contribute to this field, heritage studies has become one of its most influential frameworks. Within this perspective, religious buildings—whether historic or contemporary, active, transformed, or abandoned—are predominantly understood as heritage.

This framing highlights the historicity of religious buildings, their architectural significance, and their role in religious, communal, and national traditions. At the same time, it may obscure other dimensions of their agency: their economic and ecological entanglements, their more-than-human relations, their capacity to shape everyday practices and affects, or even their exclusive, disciplinary, and oppressive effects. To frame a building as heritage is not merely to describe it but to enact a particular mode of valuation, mobilising normative, emotional, legal, and political discourses that perform the building as worthy of preservation, protection, and stabilization.

Programme

Lundi, 21 septembre

13 h Mot d’ouverture

13h15 – 14 h Ferdinand de JONG (anthropologist and heritage scholar, FU Berlin)
Agency, Affordances and Affects: Perspectives from Critical Heritage Studies

14 h – 14h30 Q&A

14h30 – 15 h Pause café

15 h – 15h45 Kate JORDAN (historian of architecture, Westminster University)
Religious Heritage as Resource for Identity, Belonging, Exclusion and Populism (online)

15h45 – 16h30 Anne FORNEROD (legal scholar, Université Strasbourg)
Religious Heritage as Legal Challenge in Europe

16h30 – 17 h Pause café

17 h – 17h45 Tomáš ŘEPA (historian of architecture, Czech National heritage institute)
Heritage Conservation in Socialist Czechoslovakia Following the Second Vatican Council, with Particular Regard to Religious Buildings

17h45 – 18h30 Solomiia BRYZHOVATA (anthropology student, Charles University Prague)
Heritage in Military Conflicts

Mardi, 22 septembre

9 h – 9h45 Samuel GOYVAERTS (theologian, Tilburg University)
Theological Agency of Religious Building and Interferences with Religious Heritage Understandings (online)

9h45 – 10h30 Norbert SCHMIDT (architect, head of the Centre for theology and art of Czech christian Academy)
Artistic and Architectural Interventions in Religious Buildings – Where Is the Place of the Heritage?

10h30 – 11 h Pause café

11 h –11h45 Dominika DLUGOSZ (architect, Politechnica Krakowska)
Between Preservation and Transformation: Adaptive Reuse of Historic Churches in Poland – Selected Case Studies and Conservation Boundaries (online)

11h45 – 12h30 Barbora SPALOVÁ, Anne FORNEROD, Agnieszka HALEMBA: Clôture

© Ivan Pinkava: Noční práce, postní intervence v akademickém kostele Nejsvětějšího Salvátora, 2025
photo : Petr Neubert