Urban contemplation and the sacred at the ophir Loyola oncological hospital: pairing on a photoetnographic trail

Abstract

The photoethnographic essay reports the personal project “The Urban space as a place of Contemplation” and the clipping related to the photos of the sacred spaces of the Oncological Hospital Ophir Loyola, present in my master's dissertation “The meanings of illness due to colorectal cancer: ethnographic study”. Mediating a sensitive path as a nurse, qualitative researcher and treating depression, in contact and immersion in data from people sick with cancer during the surgical wait with whom I lived in the afternoons, in addition to photographic records in the city of Belém (PA) and records of Chapel of the oncology hospital, this essay was thought out.

Concatenating such polysemic meanings with images, urban contemplation was the path adopted by Huberto Rohden in “Metaphysics of Christianity” in the concepts-acts: visualization of the absolute reality (One), isolation and cosmopostamento, introspection and exteriorization (making the records) , combined with approaches known as postmodern and post-structural by Ross Bernay in his 2019 article Following the Inner Camino: An Autoethnographic Study based on the concept of Path, reflection and self-observation in: 1. following alternative routes walking; 2. getting involved and receiving advice from others, and 3. renewing yourself with rest days on the autoetnographic route. The photo collection was registered with a 14cm x 6.5 cm cell phone from the Samsung Galaxy J3, being managed from posts on the social network Instagram as a diary of reflections and sensations, the pictures of the sacred symbols of Ophir Loyola were presented in part of the dissertation and totally here. There were 85 photographs of urban contemplation in 2018 and 2019, while in the hospital from September 2018 to March 2019. Two contexts were stopped: one of Urban Contemplation, an internal life aspect of those who register and visualize the sensitivity to / with the people on their itineraries in urban centers, in my case the emptiness, silence and noise in the city of Belém do Pará whose family, bucolic and concrete features are side by side; next to the context of the São Lucas Chapel (inaugurated on 05/31/1985) which often some patients mentioned as spaces for contemplation, relief in despair and encounter with the sacred in the hospital.

The religious symbols, both in the Chapel of São Lucas do Hospital Oncológico and in the city, form a bridge between the lifestyle of the world and the metaphysical sphere, supporting a belief in God, Jesus, Mary and other saints, especially in relation to the symbols photographed: Catholics. For the sick that I lived with, the sacred induces a willingness to accept the consequences of the illness and the surgery, for which many were hospitalized as figures of attachment and closeness. Thus, based on the experience of walking and cosmopensamento, explanations related to a mystique expressed in the essay in: Camiño: Maria; The One / Centrality; Gates; Supplications; Pitch hues; Micro and macro; Ways; Saints and Martyrs. Urban contemplation was a valuable self-initiation for profound apprehension of the senses that were narrated to me daily in Ophir Loyola by the sick, while the progress of a city and the feelings I was aware of were shocked, allowing, therefore, a gradual liberation from tyranny of the environment as stated by Rodhen.