Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses how the material and spatial dimensions in the conversion from one religious site to another influence practices of adherents, aiming at deconstructing the dichotomy between the representing human subject and the represented building object.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, more and more churches in Western European cities are abandoned and then converted to another religious sites such as mosques. Previous literatures on these building conversions have been focused exclusively on meanings or discourses given by human actors (church congregants, mosque adherents, politicians, local authorities etc.) in the politics among them. Such tendency is informed by integration-oriented norms in contemporary Western European societies, and moreover, by remaining modern epistemological dichotomies (subject/object, human/non-human), which has prevented scholars from grasping the phenomena comprehensively considering materiality and spatiality.

This paper explores, on the contrary, material-spatial continuities/modifications involved in a conversion process and their entanglements with religious practices of Muslims using the converted bulding, through a case study of the conversion from Lutheran Capernaum-Church into Al-Nour Mosque in Hamburg, Germany. In the analysis of this paper, materials and space in the building are conceived not only as mere objects of representation but also as autonomous actors influencing human ones, drawing on the “Actor-Network-Theory” proposed by Bruno Latour.