In this visual essay I present a body of artistic work done within informal urban and suburban heritage sites in Kyoto. Through the media of text, photography, film and site-specific painting, my works from the cycle Spirit Grounds engage with these sites involving material physical aspects as well as beliefs, fictions, and more-than-human beings. Building upon this, I propose ‘phantom writing’ or ‘phantasmography’ as a situated, multidisciplinary and multisensory approach aimed at understanding and designing contemporary places, landscapes and environments, acknowledging and mediating the agency of diverse phantoms and phantasms.

There is a tradition in architecture and art – proclaimed by Leon Battista Alberti, Adolf Loos and others – to refrain from dirt. According to such an understanding, architectural and creative thinking and making are conceived as an intellectual and pure endeavor. Dirt, impurity, contamination are, however, inevitable when firmly grounding architecture and other ways of worldmaking in our complex reality. I therefore advocate “dirty work” as a modus operandi that is more suitable for the enormous challenges that we are facing. Dirty work demands active material and bodily engagements with places and environments instead of idealizations and abstractions from a distance. It relies on fieldwork as a practice of working in, with and through the field, its materiality and the immaterial relations that it is made up of.

The works of artist and preservation architect Jorge Otero-Pailos on experimental preservation provoke deep reflections about some of the fundamental questions dealing with heritage: temporality of objects, changeability of inscribed cultural values, the greater purpose of architectural preservation as a cultural practice, and the societal role of an architect and preservationist in formulating narratives around heritage. As the artistic installations featured in this visual essay — The Ethics of Dust (2014–2016) and Watershed Moment (2020) — demonstrate, Jorge Otero-Pailos combines various elusive elements, such as water sounds and dust, to conceive meditative and contemplative spaces. His installations invite visitors to pause and reflect on the memories, both personal, social, and environmental, that define each of us; they probe deep into the past and deep into the future.

Since these are some of the issues we wanted to explore in this special issue, ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’, we invited various artists and scholars to write a very short caption in reaction to the images provided by the author through one of these three ‘lenses’:

- affect, embodied experience, atmosphere;

- politics of heritage;

- processes of meaning-making.

The results reveal the power of images to provoke imagination through atmospheric and embodied experiences, and the power of experimental heritage work to convey (political) meaning across distance and different analogue or digital media.

This visual essay includes contributions from (in order of appearance): Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink, Federico De Matteis, Michael Hirschbichler, Jovana Popić, Maria De Piedade Ferreira, Uta Pottgiesser, Marcus Weisen and Brady Wagoner, with an epilogue from Jorge Otero-Pailos.