Although I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, there is no denying the fact that when I entered the Igreja de São Francisco in Salvador, Bahia – one of the most famous baroque churches in Brazil – I had an immediate bodily reaction: my nipples hardened. No goose bumps, no gasping for air, no shivers down my spine (bodily responses which somehow feel more admissible to open an academic discussion) but hard nipples. And mind you, it wasn't even the first time I entered this church.

‘The erection of nipples’, writes the Wikipedia entry on the subject (where I hastily sought to objectify the curious response of this unruly body of mine), ‘is due to the contraction of smooth muscle under the control of the autonomic nervous system’. The site also reassures me that hard nipples are

For whatever this information is worth, the important fact to note here is that an architectural space worked my ‘autonomic nervous system’. A religious building made my ‘cylindrically arranged muscle cells’ respond, quite independent of what I deem appropriate for visiting a church or consider becoming for opening an academic inquiry. What this oddly detached encyclopedic language effectively brings to the fore, then, is that in situations where people enter religious buildings, the body is as much a medium as the church. Both are sensationproducing instruments. Rather than sticking to the sender (church)-receiver (visitor) model, we are dealing with the intersection of two mediating systems.

In this contribution, I want to draw attention to what seems to be the sovereign power of an aesthetic formation such as a church building over (the body of ) its visitors–more in particular the sense of loss and disorientation that comes with it.