**1. Introduction**

The concept of performance can be understood through different perceptions resulting from different disciplinary approaches, artistic fields or cultural contexts (Wardrip-Fruin 2006). It is also because of this conceptual openness and the diversity of creative practices that performance, as an action in front of an audience (Carlson 2004), offers a great potential for exploration, on which we would like to base this essay, focusing especially on the confluence between sound and image, mnemonic and sensory media, as a theme of theoretical and creative recognition, in religious places.

Performance has become a meeting point between the arts, where unconventional forms of dialogue converge in the desire to develop an experiment of fusion of artists with an intertextual, multisensory, technological and experiential approach to the event (Dinis 2020). In this sense, audiovisual performances are characterized by the inclusion of alternative aesthetics and technological innovation, decentralizing from the body/performer and extending to other media, namely sound and image.

The interrelationship between sound and visual media thus appears as a device to weave new possibilities of constructing meaning, where dialogical connections can emerge through rereading and reinterpretations that induce the audience to move to other contexts through the manipulation of sound and image, where the sound follows the image or vice versa, not homogeneously mixed in fruition. Sound and image, in confluence, offer a wider range of possibilities for interrelations, elaborating other narratives that, in the

**Citation:** Dinis, Frederico. 2023. Performativity of the Memory of Religious Places through Sound and Image. *Religions* 14: 1137. https:// doi.org/10.3390/rel14091137

Academic Editors: Fátima Matos Silva, Isabel Borges and Helena Albuquerque

Received: 27 June 2023 Revised: 13 August 2023 Accepted: 1 September 2023 Published: 5 September 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

performative moment, are no longer either sound or visual, but both, in a materialization of an ephemerality achieved through the use of technological means. We also assume that in the performative moments, the artist/performer is considered not only as an operator of sound and visual media but also as a mediator, a creator and, consequently, a narrator who constructs the sound and visual narratives.

Sound and image evolve in a combinatorial potential that conceptually expands the live audiovisual performance. And when sound and image simultaneously capture both senses in a single aesthetic-narrative sense, there is an articulation that not only captures the viewer's attention but also leads to new interpretations. This discussion of the capacity of live audiovisual performance to promote new interpretations and poetic readings of works raises new questions about the production of effects of presence through technological mediation in specific places. It is, therefore, necessary to examine these territories and the processes of mediation in the production of effects of presence in audiovisual performative moments in religious places.

Although other approaches reconstruct the spatial self through ritual and belief, this essay focuses on exploring the confluence of sound and image in religious places through a process of research through artistic practice in the field of contemporary performance, analyzing the role of site-specific audiovisual performances in the process of perception and apprehension, reflecting on the effects of the embodied perception of space through a performativity of memory in religious places, and examining the effects of the aesthetic and performative configurations through which religion/religiosity/religious belief is transmitted on its most individual manifestations in site-specific nonverbal artistic creations.

To respond to these objectives, a methodology of research through artistic practice is used, based on the principle that the performativity of memory and the construction of a narrative as a temporal text (Fonseca 1992) reinforces the role of sound and visual media in the context of audiovisual performances and during performative moments. The involvement of the audience thus escapes the commonplace of everyday corporeality, diluting the permanent boundaries and exploiting physical experience as a motto for spatial transgression and the construction of a spatial 'self'.

To rethink these issues and structure the arguments, this essay is divided into four main parts, in addition to this Introduction and the Conclusions at the end.

In the Section 2, Presence Effects, we consider the significance of the question of presence and its emptiness through technological mediation, creating in the debate an apparent opposition between the 'live' and the 'mediated'. We also argue that presence does not belong to a particular medium or living body but is produced through performative, live and mediated moments.

In the Section 3, Performative Moments, we reflect on the concepts of performative space and time in performative practice to analyze the performative moment as a moment of artistic expression that promotes a symbolic liturgy. We also highlight the conditions of space that affect performance, namely, in religious places as spaces that have special and intangible qualities, arguing that religious places are relational and contingent.

In the Section 4, Performativity of Memory, we analyze the place as a space endowed with sensations, affections and allusions to lived experiences and memories as lived records that start from memories and eternalize places as references and passages. We also highlight the importance of the performativity of memory that operates through sounds and images and which operates as an activator.

The Section 5, Methodology, presents the process of research through artistic practice (practice-as-research) followed in this research, guided by a 'conceptual model of approach to place' (Dinis 2020). It is thus a systematization of the processes involved in approaching the three religious places where the site-specific projects were developed, which is understood as a process of constant questioning. We also propose the (de)construction of the sense of place throughout a personal reading on the mediation through nonverbal means, focused on exploring key issues in this research.

Starting from a set of artistic practices and audiovisual performative moments that we have developed in this research, we explore and deepen the confluence between sound and image, linking and relating concepts, purposes and coherence of artistic practices that use these two means in the reformulation of religious places and how individual and community identities are mediated and reconfigured. Religious places are spaces that seek to create a place of spiritual connection and to reinforce religious ontological positions in the world, where interaction with the sacred is found and where the meaning and significance of human existence are intensified (Barrie 2010).

This intensification can be enhanced by mediation through sound and visual means, since when sound and image simultaneously capture both senses in a single aestheticnarrative sense, there is an articulation that not only captures the viewer's attention but also leads to new interpretations (Wardrip-Fruin 2006).

These interpretations raise several issues about the perception of site-specific performances through the mediation of nonverbal means in religious spaces. How can the performativity of memory be an autobiographical concept enhanced through live audiovisual performances in religious places? How can the performativity of memory in religious places promote a spatial 'self' through live audiovisual performances? How does the construction of a spatial 'self' involve processes of social and artistic reconfiguration in live audiovisual performances in religious places compelled through the performativity of memory?

For the development of these lines of inquiry, practice needed to be present throughout the process, as the issues considered were the result of the practical component; otherwise, we would not have truly 'practice-based' research (Silva 2011). The approach followed in this research involved the realization of three site-specific projects in religious places (Tree of Life Chapel in Braga, Chapel of the Immaculate in Braga and Church of Cedofeita in Porto), under a proper format and language of research through artistic practice, intending to analyze and develop functional methods and strategies linked to the development of the artistic creations themselves and the proposal of ways of locally representing them.

These site-specific projects are also anchored in previously developed research through artistic practice and amplify nonverbal aesthetic and performative forms through which religion manifests and can be culturally transmitted. This previous research through artistic practice has shown that the interrelationship between sound and visual mediums, the performativity and the work of memory in site-specific performances emerges as an artifice to weave new transformations that inspire different forms of knowledge, whether intellectual, performative or sensory.

A website1 has also been structured to present documentation on the process of designing, presenting and receiving site-specific projects. Taken as a whole, these materials deepen and illustrate the paths of research through artistic practice and are therefore materials inherent to creative making itself, rightly understood as a reflective practice.
