Cultivating the House of Mary: materialities of the National Basilica of Aparecida

This thesis explores some of the religious mediations that are practiced in the continuous process of building the National Basilica of Our Lady Aparecida (Aparecida, São Paulo). In construction since the 1950s, and without a deadline, I demonstrate how, to every new construction work that is announced to that space, a version of history and theology is also materialized, which overlaps practices of Catholicism and the national imaginary, in the search to project, out of present forms, an idealized future for both. The thesis, which is based on an ethnography of the building's interior design project in the 2010s as well as on historiographic documents, is divided into three thematic sections that aim to explore the various ways of continuous cultivation of the Basilica by the Catholic Church. I demonstrate that, without replacing or excluding previous forms completely, Catholicism is manufactured along with the new architectural layers in the church in its plural set of materialities that correlate religion, art and nationalism. The Basilica of Aparecida is made to be religiously experienced both outside and inside, closely and from afar, with guides or without maps, in partial ways, but never in its totality (AU)