Poly-spatial experiences of the past at European cultural heritage sites

This article explores ways in which visitors both feel and reflect on the past as part of their affective and interpretive practices of meaning-making in, of, and within heritage spaces. We aim to describe a form of subjective and affective experience that links to moments of reflection, which can create a new understanding of the site’s multi-layered past and change visitors’ understanding of the pasts the heritage sites represent. Our examples address the diverse and heterogeneous layers of experience that operate simultaneously in heritage spaces. The multi-layered experiences contribute to an empathetic understanding of the past. This can also result in a new assessment of how we think about what the site, the event represented at the site or the time, in which the event took place, might have meant for the people then and how it relates to us now. In our analysis, we draw on the concept of poly-space, which was originally developed to make sense of our own fieldwork experiences. We suggest that the interplay of poly-spatial experiences in heritage sites can potentially dissolve culturally implemented understandings of time and space, mind and body, material and immaterial, and affect and cognition.