A Construção Visual do Sagrado em Trindade (GO): imagens, marcos religiosos e a experiência visual no espaço urbano

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the sacred is visually constructed in the city of Trindade (GO), based on its religious landmarks, devotional images, and urban landscape, considering the period from 2024 to 2025. The study shifts the analytical focus beyond major seasonal events, such as the July pilgrimage, seeking to understand the enduring forms of visuality that organize religious experience in everyday life. It is grounded in the assumption that the sacred does not present itself as an abstract essence, but rather as a socially and culturally constructed experience, mediated by images, practices, apparatuses, and regimes of perception. The research draws on theoretical frameworks from visual culture studies and the anthropology of images, adopting visual ethnography as its central methodological approach. The analysis focuses on four key landmarks: the Stations of the Cross along the Pilgrims’ Highway, the Portal of the Divine Eternal Father, urban sacred imagery, and the Parish Church of the Divine Eternal Father. These elements are understood as visual apparatuses that organize pathways, gestures, affects, and symbolic hierarchies, thereby structuring a politics of the sensible within the urban space. The findings indicate that Trindade is configured as a shrinecity whose territorialization is closely linked to devotion to the Divine Eternal Father, which originated in a lay and popular religious experience in the nineteenth century and later developed under the aegis of institutional Catholicism through the Redemptorist Congregation. With regard to the central symbol, a persistent tension was observed between iconography and devotional reception: although the image represents the Holy Trinity, devotion privileges the Father, revealing a relational and affective logic characteristic of popular Catholicism. The analysis further demonstrates that the sacred is visually constructed through a combination of monumentality, repetition, and proximity, manifesting itself both within the temple and in the street. It is concluded that the visuality of the sacred in Trindade constitutes a historically situated regime in which images, architecture, and bodily practices produce socially meaningful religious experiences, mobilizing affects and structuring ways of seeing, feeling, and inhabiting the urban space.