Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic narrative from Israel, with its sacred sites marked by war and destruction, explores the dynamics of absence and presence, of imagination and reality of religious dwelling places.

Paper long abstract:

Imagining to build a church for our time: What ambiguous messages would it give, which stories would it tell, how would they be materialised in stone, glass and colour, and where would this sacred home be built? Who authorises it, how can it be consecrated? Is there a place for it, or will it rather be on the road and off the ground, a placeless chapel?

This idea of a Chapel of Placelessness underlies an ethnographic field diary written in the summer 2015 in Israel, with its density of sacral buildings, each seemingly founded on the temples and synagogues, mosques and churches underneath. In this way, sacred spaces offer their presence built on absence, on layers of cultural memory that are filled with meaning through ongoing re-negotiation of material power and immaterial world interpretation, and shaped by ancient wars that reverberate in present-day destruction and violence.

The focal point of my diary is the town and the sacred sites of Nazareth, built on the incarnation of the word, and, more concretely, on Mary's house. The place where Mary gave her "Yes" to the Angel can be found as a disputed archaeological site, a mythical place as well as an embodiment of the inner void of religion. It is an everyday dwelling place in local narratives, and a centre point of world-wide pilgrimage. And yet, at one and the same time, the House of Mary is itself imagined as a travelling chapel, absent, but ubiquitously present in innumerable Loreto churches.