MARCH-JULY 2025

Heritage Labs

From March to July 2025, the Miretage Heritage Labs unfolded in Barcelona, Leuven, Almere and Antwerp, creating spaces for local communities to explore their own relationship with religious and minority heritage. These Labs served as experimental platforms to test methodologies, share lived experiences and identify meaningful locations for the future Miretage Heritage Trails.

In Barcelona, a series of co-creative encounters combined professional dialogue with sensory experiences, inviting participants to reflect on how religious heritage is perceived and represented in the public sphere. A silent sensory walk, letters to spiritual figures and participatory debates helped surface the often invisible contributions of religious minorities to the city’s narrative.

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In Antwerp, participants explored the neighbourhood of Borgerhout through storytelling and emotion mapping. Local landmarks like a former record shop, the first mosque or a Hajj travel agency became portals into shared memories and migration histories. A chalk-map exercise on a church square encouraged emotional reflection on topics like community celebration, gentrification and cultural continuity.

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In Almere, the youngest city in the Netherlands, the Lab uncovered how a new urban identity can still be rich in heritage. Community members gathered during Ramadan to share food and stories, mapping the key spaces that shaped the Muslim presence in the city since its foundation. The Lab revealed how even the most recent cities hold layers of cultural and religious meaning waiting to be recognised.​

SEPTEMBER 2024

Project meeting in Leuven 

The second project meeting of Miretage took place on 16, 17 and 18 September 2024 in Leuven, Belgium, and was hosted by KADOC KU Leuven. This meeting was dedicated to the literature review and featured a series of workshops to prepare the ground for the next step of the project: establishing our Heritage Labs and developing the Heritage Trails.

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The first two workshops addressed heritage-making methodologies. They were offered by Guy Tilkin (Federation for European Storytelling) who focused on meaning-making methodologies and Hester Dibbits (Reinwardt Academy) on emotional networking.

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The second two workshops offered by Arjen Barel (Storytelling Centre in Amsterdam) dived into the use of storytelling techniques in heritage identification processes and how they will support the development of Miretage heritage trails. Tharik Hussain, author, journalist and heritage activist, shared the successful case of Britain’s Muslim Heritage Trails and provided participants with keys for community involvement.

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Participants also had the chance to walk the “Traces of Islam in Leuven” trail, which looks into the past and present of Islam's presence in the city.

JANUARY 2024

Symposium and project meeting in Groningen 

The kickoff meeting of Miretage took place on 22, 23 and 24 January 2024 in Groningen, the Netherlands, and was hosted by the University of Groningen. In this meeting, project partners looked together at the workplan for the three upcoming years and discussed the activities for the first stage of the project: a review of literature on religious heritage minorities and current heritage practices in Europe.

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This meeting included the symposium “Religious Heritage & Minority Communities”, which took place on 23 January 2024 and provided project partners and the wider public with an overview of the main challenges facing Jewish and Muslim communities in a historically Christian heritage landscape. This open event provided project partners with useful input to diagnose current needs around minority religious heritage in Europe.

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The symposium also marked the launch of “The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe”, a state-of-the-art guide to scholarship on religious heritage with critical analysis and an exploration of best practices.