With the political upheavals of Jair Bolsonaro as stark evidence, the traditional boundaries of public and private as well as religious and secular are rapidly transforming in Brazil. To that end, the papers in this session will examine the ways public expressions of "religion" are aesthetically constructed, experienced, and politicized within the context of modern Brazilian secularism. Presentations will explore how Brazilian secularist logics operate aesthetically in a range of contemporary settings, from museum curation to urban design and Christian nationalist movements.
This paper takes two case studies from a contemporary art museum in São Paulo, Brazil, as a critical point of departure for the study of secularism in Brazil. It examines how two shows, by Adriana Varejão and Ayrson Heráclito, both at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, offered different formulations of the relationship between religion and art. This paper takes these two case studies as a key point of departure for studying the secular in Brazil. Building on earlier secularism works, this paper analyzes museums as a secularizing force, analyzing how they direct, discipline, and frame forms of religion for the public. How do practices of creating discourse (e.g. exhibitions, work descriptions, wall texts, catalogs), placing material into space (i.e. expography), and staging encounters between art, artists, and viewers constitute and perform a secular aesthetic? How does this help us understand the aesthetics of the secular in Brazil and more broadly?
In the center of São Paulo stands two megastructures, the Edifício Copan and the Templo de Salomão. The Copan—an Oscar Niemeyer apartment building with more than 5,000 residents that opened in 1966—has been a monument to the urban life imagined by midcentury modernity. The Templo is a replica of Solomon's temple magnified to occupy an entire city block, constructed by an evangelical church for 300 million US dollars in 2014. While the Templo has become a mecca for conservative Christians throughout South America, the Copan decays; its intricate tilework falling into the street below. This paper compares what James Holston calls the “alternative modernities” represented by these edifices to diagnose the slippery hold of secularism in contemporary Brazil. It argues that instead of viewing the post-secular as an inevitable condition of post-modern societies, we should view secularism as a political project in need of intellectual repair.
This presentation argues that what was earlier held as an open “marketplace” of religion in Brazil has broken out of the private sphere to hold sway as a political force in the form of an emergent Christian nationalism. Taking Michelle Bolsonaro’s speech to a crowd on February 25th as its point of departure, I track the transit of three phenomena between religious sites and the public sphere: spiritual deliverance, Biblical Hebrew imagery, and Protestant-Catholic ecumenism. This presentation uses the theoretical concepts of discursive chains of equivalence and charisma to analyze the motifs listed above as tools political actors are using to blur the boundaries between religious authority and secular space. It ends with a reflection on the ways such blurring affects national conversations surrounding secularism, race, and freedom of speech.