IMC 2019: Sessions

This session is the second of four interconnected panels concerned with Byzantine Materiality. Here we focus on ephemera - Byzantine materials meant to be impermanent - and iconoclasm, Byzantine materials made impermanent through their conscious destruction. Focus on the immateriality of material goods allows the speakers to throw issues of Byzantine Materiality into sharp relief, and also emphasises the importance of local communities to our understanding of the Byzantine world. The first paper introduces the concept of the importance of the local to our understanding of Byzantine Materiality, and considers how ephemeral graffiti was used not simply to deface standing objects but to create local communal memory. The second paper focuses on what image destruction tells us about local relations with the wider Christian and Islamic worlds in 8th-century Palestine, and how this resonates with issues of representation and materiality in the early medieval period. The final paper moves to Constantinople, and looks at ephemeral street life and its materiality, as associated with imperial and religious processions, which incorporated dancing and decorations - often textile, but also vegetal and metallic - that no longer survive.