Affects of haunted spaces on the urban experience of Recife

Abstract

This essay-style article falls within the field of urban studies, which recognize temporality as a pivotal element for understanding historical processes, social rhythms, and spatial transformations in the city. The essay explores the legends that comprise what contemporary society has come to know as “Haunted Recife” as a structural element for the city’s imaginary construction, and as a fundamental symbolic framework for the production of urban identity and memory. It proposes a reading of these haunted spaces in light of the distinction between the sacred and the profane formulated by Mircea Eliade (2018), taking the sacred as a space capable of establishing a cosmic rupture that provides orientation in the world. In this sense, haunted buildings are interpreted as interstitial spaces: touched by a dimension of the sacred, yet distinct from other consecrated spaces— such as churches —because they retain an ineffable residue that can be situated within the Lacanian Real and/or associated with the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimlich) (FREUD, 1919/2019), thereby evoking unease and strangeness. By framing haunted spaces as ruptures between distinct times, the article highlights their potential to connect and superimpose such different urban temporalities, revealing continuities, ghosts, and discontinuities that permeate the experience of the city. Furthermore, it examines the interplay between the symbolic and imaginary construction of haunted spaces, and the structuring of their inhabitants’ subjectivity, drawing on dialogues between psychoanalytic theory and architectural theory. Thus, the essay contributes to broadening the debate on the relationships between temporality, the urban imaginary, and the production of space.