The Return of the Soul is an intense applied training program for a team working on historic site documentation, including the most important theoretical knowledge, skills, and modern approaches required for full heritage site documentation. The program uses a framework that supports the work of the interdisciplinary and integrated team and aims to enable trainees to successfully participate in learning about and introducing Egyptian cultural heritage. The activities of the program aimed to open a dialogue on the most important concepts and terms related to heritage in general, and architectural heritage in particular, with the goal of enabling participants to form a critical view of the prevailing concept of heritage and to look at the subject with a more comprehensive view while also focusing on the specificity of our local and regional reality.
The goal of the program was for participants to interact with the issues offered for discussion by writing a series of articles that expressed their understanding of the subject. The program also aimed to teach participants how to use an applied model to document architectural heritage. The Harraniya-based Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Center was picked as a model for the application. The team began by creating a form to collect data and another for photographic recording, as well as a plan for documentation and exploratory registration for a part of the site. During this time, the capabilities of finding and acquiring basic information about the site, as well as the use of photographs for registration, were put to use.
The program's main goal is to enable positive community participation in heritage preservation efforts by raising public awareness of the importance and how to do so, providing modern and appropriate mechanisms for developing community capabilities, enhancing individual and institutional skills to achieve maximum effectiveness, and mobilizing the largest possible social commitment to the issue of preserving Egypt.
The program aims to accomplish this based on the fact that achieving positive community participation through raising community awareness and developing individual capabilities necessitates a process of creating and building capacities, then using and managing them in the service of the goal for which they were developed through means that ensure the capacity development process's long-term sustainability, and the most important goals can be summarised in:
- Providing and disseminating the necessary knowledge in order to enhance the understanding of heritage, its values and its development..
- Raising public awareness of the role of effective community participation in preserving heritage..
- Informed support the conservation, management, and monitoring of heritage sites by providing accurate information..
- Support the processes of heritage registration, understanding, interpretation and presentation, and promote community involvement in these stages
- Raising awareness of the positive possibilities of rehabilitation and use of heritage sites..
- Develop trained cadres on the latest methods of preservation and documentation..
- Coordination and integration between existing individual and institutional efforts that share common goals.
First: Develop essential knowledge and skills
- Introduction to the concepts of heritage and heritage sites
- Introduction to Documentation
- Introduction to Architectural Documentation
- Methodology of Architectural Heritage Documentation - An Applied Introduction
- Models for Documenting Urban and Architectural Heritage 1
- Models for Documenting Urban and Architectural Heritage 2
- Introducing a heritage site - Ramses Wissa Wassef Center
- Documentation plan for the heritage site
Second: Develop technical recording skills
- GIS Recording
- Recording with Photography
Third: Practical Training
- On-site Photography Training - Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center
- Training to record using GIS at Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center