distance

Experimental Music in Igreja de Todos os Santos

I have visited São Miguel on two occasions, in September 2021 and April 2022, participating in the alternative music festival called Tremor while picture-making to eventually produce an ethnography of sonic identity on the island. The static images I capture throughout my visits are digitally produced. They communicate an understanding of artificial bodies within an array of venues scattered throughout the island, an intentional effort of festival organizers in their aim to provide tourists with a holistic understanding of the natural landscape and Portuguese culture as a moving target – that is, to challenge assumptions developed through knowledge of former religious or hegemonic masculine ideas (Belting 2011). It is sometimes difficult to separate the presence of Catholicism from ideas of Azorean life since each city features a central area with a church or cathedral built with similar architectural features visitors have come to expect from the island, serving as a visual reminder of religious influence.

The hunter green doors and bright white walls bordered with dark volcanic stones on the Baroque façade of the Igreja de Todos os Santos matches the exterior of other churches in the Azorean capital city, the city gates, and the exterior of the other two buildings that currently comprise the Museu Carlos Machado, which was founded in 1876. The museum is home to a vast taxidermy collection that includes over 1000 different animal species, and combined with the former convents presenting the island’s religious past, represent a clear image of visual colonization of the natural landscape (demonstrating how human existence on the land first aims to control and transform the function of the environment under the guise of understanding before acknowledging the detrimental impact with conservation efforts and changes for sustainability) (Noble 2018).

Despite the simultaneously fascinating and saddening display of petrified lifeforms, the interior of Igreja de Todos os Santos offers a breathtaking display of carved wood on the altar of the cathedral flanked by blue and white Portuguese tiles on either side. Standing beneath the center of the altar, the complexity of details included in the creation of the space becomes evident, with a myriad of faces, objects, and symbols symmetrically dispersed and accentuated with natural and installed lights. During a brief visit to the church on a Sunday afternoon, two people spontaneously began singing a hymn of unknown origin, revealing the true acoustic wonder of the space as their sonorities danced about the surfaces of the altar and echoed along the white walls leading to the back of the sanctuary space.

This alternative use of space can be viewed as queering these spaces, which can be understood in considering music and queerness. Hankins (2014) states that a queer relationship with music involves arousal as an embodied practice that “dissolves the boundaries between self and music by opening up the somatic apparatus to music’s energies,” which “enables the individual to locate herself, and to locate music, within social power structures that are undergirded by a sexual order” (87). She describes performances of queer identity as “improvisations on social text using the raw materials of social power itself” (Hankins 2014, 103). This power is found in being a body among others seeking an experiential escape that is literally bound by space and time but only figuratively bound by identity. The space is malleable with the knowledge that individuals can produce their reality dependent on their level of engagement and introduce change in their identity performance without being held to cultural standards – something true regardless of gender or sexual performance in the concert space. Without their visible or audible difference being a focus during engagement, individuals can be more expressive and open to new experiences, with sound as a motivator for release, prompting both engagement and disengagement.

Sounds and spaces are afforded the same liberation, improvising on the social (and societal) knowledge of what is expected or acceptable to create new geographies (or modes of navigating) different performances of identity. This reality removes the necessity to mentally acknowledge religious praise as the dominant mode of sonic performance in Igreja de Todos os Santos, although the structure still visually presents a history of Catholic Portuguese culture that may not inherently be known as such to the unknowing tourist, but still reflects the design of a religious structure with specific behaviors connected to existence in the space. The performance itself is an improvisation in the moment but does not exist with an ongoing impact on the space or meanings within it. The sound is moving through the space as the alternative understandings of the space similarly do, leaving images to capture the spaces as something beyond what is tangibly possible. The sonic is untraceable to a greater extent, sounding in the moment, lingering in recording, but removed from the space in the simultaneous moment of utterance: it is a memory. Because of this, festival organizers continue to imagine new functions for diverse spaces throughout the island, a sometimes challenging and playful pursuit that produces new geographies of bodily performance and sonic acknowledgement of identity, Portuguese or otherwise.