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Breath, Technology, Making of Community 173

people. Nowhere is this preference as manifest as in the hugely popular
Geração PHN (PHN Generation). Meaning No for Today (Por Hoje Não),
PHN Generation primarily concentrates on the daily struggle against sin
by teenage and early adult Catholic Charismatics. Among PHNers confes-
sion happens primarily through the body rather than verbally or through
sacrament. The body confesses, and expresses the restorative powers of the
Holy Spirit. Religious mega-festivals use songs, prayers, and gestures to
structure breath and move the body to confess. Like a form of purification,
sins are expelled from the body because as Charismatics reveal, “it is
important to improve on the body’s potential to retain oil or chrism.” The
gamut of gifts endowed by the spirit during the Baptism is manifest as an
oily fragrant substance; hence the reason why Charismatics refer to one
another as “anointed.” The premise is that an anointed body will more eas-
ily be able to induce the body to expel sin and absorb good.
Frequently described as a kind of “bath immersion in the spirit,” the
baptism marks, thus, the moment when an individual supposedly attains
higher levels of proprioceptive awareness. During prayer, practitioners are
called to concentrate on the body internally, and to redirect “oil” to points
of tension, closure or ill feeling within the body. The idea is to expand the
degrees of freedom within the body, that is, to raise the level of joints
mobility, and at the same time, to enter into a relation of permeability with
the outside world. As in Pentecost, the body heretofore blocked, starts to
open up to the surrounding environment. The aerobic style of Charismatic
celebrations sharpens such porosity. Through bodily engagement in
breathing exercises, which people learn with the help of recorded technol-
ogies, transpiration, and transparency interrelate. Progressively, the per-
ception of the body turns to include and coimplicate, the exterior. The
body ceases to be perceived as a self-contained entity, and starts to take on
the relational status of a breathing organ predicated on the reciprocal
exchange of in and out. Concurrently, a change in the center of gravity
seems to occur. From a definable locatable position, the baptized body
becomes particularly sensitive to balances in input and output. The body
becomes increasingly lighter, fusing with the “electrical life” of the spirit.
Thus, repetition and recursivity, agility and fluidity all become qualities

shared at once by the aerobic body, the spirit, and electronic technologies
across a relational network. Through breathing, Canção Nova is at once
the mechanical expression of the apostolic community, as the community
is the humanized embodiment of technology.
Religious spaces in Canção Nova, likewise, materialize the logic of
openness and transparency. Voids, meshes, or permeable structures have a
distinctive presence in Catholic Charismatic architecture (de Abreu, 2008).
Iron-grid metal materials are particularly used to intersect the walls of