Methodology
A distinctive feature of the methodology is the use of custom-built recording and playback devices as research tools. Material captured on site is later played back within the environment, establishing a recursive exchange between lived experience and its representation. These encounters enable collaborators to reinterpret their practices as they unfold and renegotiate their relationship to the spaces they inhabit. Representation becomes performative and dialogic, with filmmaking and site activation operating as the primary analytic processes.
Conceptually, site-integrity draws on relational theories of place, particularly Doreen Massey’s account of space as an evolving constellation of social, material, and symbolic relations. Extending Miwon Kwon’s phenomenological, institutional, and discursive paradigms of site-specificity, the methodology advances a fourth, performative paradigm in which site is understood as an emergent field continually produced through practice, interaction and exchange. This processual framing foregrounds questions of authorship, governance and spatial agency, emphasising how sites are actively constituted rather than passively occupied. Through iterative and site-responsive processes, site-integrity produces insights that are both situated and transferable, demonstrating how social and cultural life is enacted, negotiated and organised through space. Film installations and digital living archives operate simultaneously as research methods and modes of dissemination, enabling communities to articulate and narrate their environments as dynamic, collective, and continually evolving.
The methodology was first introduced in the Journal for Artistic Research (2019) and further developed in Scene (Vol. 11, 2023), with its approach to digital, community-authored archives expanded in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2025).