Material religion, colonial heritage, and building modernity in Brazil

Abstract

This article takes the relation between religious buildings and cities as its starting point. Unlike the majority perspective in Latin America, our focus in this article is not on the construction of temples but on the disputes arising from the demolition of religious buildings. We argue that demolition implies the decomposition of religious materialities and their circulation in other spaces: museums, public buildings, and other churches. This article focuses on two cases to explore the tensions between a modern city project and Brazil’s colonial past heritage. The articulating element of these two axes is the perspective that we face (yet another) tension between religion and modernity, which, in this case, is spatially inscribed.