Reinwardt Nieuwe Kerk, Delft (Netherlands). Photo: David Stegenga.
In this interview, August den Hollander and Paul Ariese discuss their collaborative minor program, ‘Religious Heritage in Amsterdam’, which explores religion and heritage. August den Hollander is a professor of religious heritage at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Paul Ariese is a senior lecturer at the Reinwardt Academy, part of the Amsterdam University of the Arts, and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam focusing on the heritagisation of Jewish religious life.
Together, they have developed a unique, interdisciplinary minor program that combines theoretical study with hands-on experience, engaging students from various academic backgrounds in the exploration of religious heritage in and around Amsterdam.
1. Would you like to introduce yourself?
August den Hollander: My name is August den Hollander. I’m professor of religious heritage at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Originally, I come from the field of (religious) bookhistory but almost 10 years ago my field broadened to religious heritage and a little bit later, I started the cooperation with Paul.
Paul Ariese: I’m a senior lecturer at the Reinwardt Academy, a faculty of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. I have a background in exhibition development and hold a Masters in museum studies. I’m also a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam with a focus on the heritagisation of Jewish religious life, specifically in and around the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam.
2. And could you please tell us a bit more about the program and how it was set up?
Paul Ariese: I think we started to work together five years ago. August was already at the Vrije Universiteit and offering courses on religious heritage and I was doing the same at the Reinwardt Academy. Our cooperation started with combining our individual courses and then three years ago, we started to coordinate a complete 30 ECTS minor programme, called ‘Religious Heritage in Amsterdam’.
We’re looking at built religious heritage, objects, intangible heritage and memory culture, and we do that both in the religious context and also in the museum and heritage context. The minor is a cooperative programme of our two institutions and we bring together a group of, on average, 12 to 15 students on a yearly basis. They come from different backgrounds, not only academically (in terms of the type of university), but also disciplinary, ranging from cultural heritage, theology, religious studies, European studies, art history, design, architecture, media studies, economics, business, to even medicine. So it’s really exciting to bring all these young and passionate people together. They also come for different reasons: for some it is a personal journey finding their way into the heritage field, trying to figure out how their own religious interests or roots, or maybe how the religious roots of their family, play a role somewhere.
Some students are already aware of the challenges and questions that come with religious heritage, such as different stakeholders’ claims of ownership over heritagised churches or objects, or the positioning of religious heritage in a diverse and religious complex society. What we always stress is that if you can deal with religious heritage, you can deal with any form of heritage because all the challenges and issues and questions that are associated with heritage dynamics are on the table when you discuss religious heritage.
August den Hollander: Maybe even more so, because the topics like inclusiveness and diversity are very present, of course, in the field of religious heritage. We visit groups and communities, temples, synagogues, mosques, from all different kinds of denominations and talk with people there and experience how these groups maintain themselves in society and what kind of issues they encounter. The students develop a great sensitivity about what, in practice, inclusiveness and diversity can mean for a (religious) group in Dutch society.
Reinwardt Nieuwe Kerk, Delft (Netherlands). Photo: David Stegenga.
3. What’s the structure of the program?
August den Hollander: We start in September, and we finish at the end of January. Each week, we have two days fully loaded. In the morning, we discuss theory and in the afternoon, we have more practice related topics, so we have an excursion or have a dialogue with experts in the field. We always try to combine theory and practice on the same day, which has turned out to be very fruitful.
We learn a lot from our students and from all the interactions we have with the field. So it’s very different to standing in front of a classroom, giving your traditional lecture, and then leaving the room again. It’s a very intense cooperation, but it’s really great and stimulating for us as well.
Paul Ariese: Yes, every year it turns out to be a very rewarding experience for all of us. And not just for us: we have all these visits to museums, but we also join a service in the synagogue or in a church or in the mosque, which for those communities is also a form of acknowledgement. They’re always very welcoming and really like the idea that young people show this interest in their heritage. This interest also increases communities’ awareness of the role that places, objects, traditions and the like play in their commemorative and representational practices. I believe it is a form of empowerment for all involved.
All these visits help students to discover the different perspectives that are present when it comes to religious heritage. So although I think it’s very interesting to look at an object through the glass of the showcase, that’s only one perspective. We also want students to see and experience objects and practices in real life, and see how it matters and what it means for people.
August den Hollander: We begin with an introductory module on what is religious heritage, exploring who is involved in the debate and the different positions on repurposing churches and other religious spaces. Amsterdam provides many examples to discuss in the minor, as we have traces of so many different religious groups in the city that have been there for so many centuries. Therefore the history of Amsterdam is the topic of the second module of the minor. There is so much to discover as this process of migration is still going on until today, of course, because of all the groups coming to Amsterdam and the ongoing creation of heritage. So in the third module, we focus on the memory culture of religious migrant communities, examining how their experience of living in Amsterdam and maintaining connections to other places and periods are embodied and materialized.
The fourth module focuses on a research project that I’m doing with one of the museums in Amsterdam. Museum Our Lord in the Attic and students are involved in this research project. In this project we are making a religious map of Amsterdam (https://deanderekaart.amsterdam/en). It’s a map on which we will present all religious locations in the city from the past and the present, through an object that tells us something about itself, its location, but also about the city of Amsterdam. So in all these stories together we’ll tell the largest story: the multi-religious DNA of the city of Amsterdam. In this project we have professionals, volunteers, institutions, colleagues and also students, for example, students from our minor but also students from other Universities, Colleges, or other training programmes that are participating and writing stories and becoming an author in this online project.
This year, for example, the students of our minor worked on a city walk about the 14th century monasteries in Amsterdam. They would stop on specific spots where stories were told about monasteries that were there or specific remains you can still see. And this walk and all the stories are going to be published in March, as well as key outputs from this phase of the project.
The students all find it very, very stimulating that their work is not just being corrected and then goes into the shredder, but they have an online publication. They really dive into doing research and because it is so concrete and it leads to a very concrete output it is also a way of stimulating students to enjoy doing research and to learn how fun it is and how something really comes out of it.
Paul Ariese: The fifth, and final, module is about religious heritage and storytelling and it’s usually being done in collaboration with a museum or a religious community that has a specific question or demand or wish, and our students develop presentation concepts to help them share their own heritage with a broader, not necessarily religious involved audience. Additionally, in these five modules we work on developing specific academic skills, as an integral part of the learning process. For example finding literature, reviewing literature, doing research, storytelling, all these kinds of academic skills are more or less embedded in the various modules of this minor programme.
Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht. Exhibition ‘Under the spell of the Middle Ages’. Photo: Paul Ariese.
‘Thank you so much for this incredibly fun minor! I have been to places that I had no idea about before and would never have been able to go visit. I have grown tremendously during the program, both professionally and personally, and have learned many new skills (…) The minor has confirmed my interest in religious heritage, and I hope to continue with this track in my future studies or internship’ – Lucia Jongkind, student of the program (Reinwardt Academy)
4. Did you already have relationships with these religious community representatives? Was it difficult to establish sufficient trust so they would open up and let you and your students attend and experience the religious practice? Because this is often a challenge.
Paul Ariese: Well, some relationships we had. We both have a large network, not just in the heritage field but also with religious communities of different denominations. And for the rest it’s a matter of investing in new relationships. I think sincere interest in what people are doing opens many doors. Individuals or (religious) communities may have a different approach to heritage than (cultural or heritage) institutions have, but we think it so valuable to not stick to one idea of what heritage is. It is a very dynamic concept. And every talk we have, every lesson, and every encounter, demonstrates the critical role of heritage in identity formation, in memory culture, in connecting with the community’s past, but also positioning the community in the presence with an eye for the future.
5. What has been the outcome of the programme?
August den Hollander: Some of our students, after the minor programme, do an internship in the museum or start working in a museum that is part of our network, or somewhere else in a policy position or in a company that is working with heritage or religious heritage. When we go into the field with our students, we sometimes meet our former students who are now professionally working with heritage or religious heritage. This is a great experience for us and it also is very stimulating for our students to see that other students that did this minor a couple of years earlier now end up in a museum or another professional position in these fields.
Also for museums, religion and the presence of religion in museums is not always recognised partly because, we hear, that it’s not easy to find young curators who have or are personally involved in a religious tradition or are being well trained to have this ‘religious’ sentiment, concretely to be aware of the religious diversity, the ethical issues related to religious objects, the sensitivity in relation to displaying a religious object, and what musealisation means for the religious community where the object, for example, originally comes from.
So, in a way, museums are also the asking party. They are looking forward, they’re hoping that we will deliver students that have been trained in handling these sensitivities that relate to religion and its materiality. At universities, it’s less common to have such a focus also on practice and the work field, but we think that for this minor it works quite well to combine theory and practice, and also to bring together students from different academic backgrounds.
Debate in Lebuinus Church, Deventer. Photo: August den Hollander
‘Your enthusiasm and in-depth knowledge really brought the lessons to life. The excursions offered unique insights that I would otherwise never have experienced. Your approach made me feel really involved in the subject, and I learned a lot in this relatively short period. I also appreciate your openness to questions and discussions. These ways have increased my understanding of religious heritage and how to discuss and deal with it and stimulated me to think and talk about it further.’ – Nina Woltz, student of the program (Reinwardt Academy)
6. It really touches upon everything that all our network members discuss and what young professionals really need. Are you open to collaborating with other universities that might want to set up these programmes?
August den Hollander: We’re also very open to cooperation and maybe creating a summer school, that’s what we did a couple of years ago in Amsterdam, where we attracted lots of students from abroad which was a very stimulating experience, because of all the different perspectives coming together.
Paul Ariese: I agree one of the ways is that indeed we can also share the lessons from our course programmes in the form of this summer school. We are very open to sharing our knowledge about our approach and about the set-up of the programme. I think in every country the history and heritage of religion is different, so you always have to make translation. It all starts with sitting together and making an inventory of the specific needs in the context that an educational institute or a heritage organisation is working with. I think you need this openness and passion to bring everything together.
Additionally, writing these articles (linked at the end of the interview) serves as an outlet for sharing our experiences. I think most of what we do now, the learning goals and the approach of our current minor programme is reflected already in these articles from a couple of years ago.
The bottom line is that for many (students) the minor ‘Religious Heritage in Amsterdam’ is a very intense but maybe life-changing experience. There’s so much shared passion, from our side but also from the side of the students. So that works both sides and for everything that we put in, we receive it double back.
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Articles
- Ariese, Paul. 2023. ‘Teaching in Musealized Religious Spaces: Lessons from an Amsterdam Seminar’. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe, Todd Weir and Lieke Wijnia (eds.), 427-435. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DOI: 10.5040/9781350251410.ch-046.
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Ariese, Paul. 2021. ‘Interpreting Religion with Cultural Heritage Students’. Museum and Society 19:1, 1-16. DOI: 10.29311/mas.v19i1.3430
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