Atmospheric Encounters: Interfaith Dialogue in a Multifaith Neighbourhood of Copenhagen

This chapter explores material aspects of an interfaith dialogue course through the concept of atmosphere. Based on findings from fieldwork in 2016 at Brorson’s Church, the Imam Ali Mosque and the space in between, the concept is introduced in order to analyse the entanglement of spaces, matter, bodies and subjectivities in local interfaith dialogue practices. The analysis seeks to unravel how atmospheres tune encounters, and thus also how and which embodied attunements emerge among the participants? The analysis consists of three parts, each taking up a different atmospheric tuning. The first tuning drew upon the sacrality of church and mosque and invited participants to orient towards a shared and embodied spirituality. The invitation was inclusive, but in partly contradictory ways. In the second tuning, the atmosphere of the nave of the church became entangled with the course exercises and co-produced an expectation of transcendence. The third tuning emerged in the everyday atmosphere of a walk and talk between Brorson’s Church and the Imam Ali Mosque, which appeared to tune the participants into a collaborative and open-ended dialogue. The three atmospheres were suggestive of orientations and movements in their accentuation of particular relationships between different bodies, as well as between the sacred and the profane.