Byzantium - Bridge between worlds

24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies

THEMATIC SESSION FOR FREE COMMUNICATIONS:

INEFFABLE ARCHAEOLOGIES BYZANTIUM AND THE WEST
CHOREOGRAPHIC AND HIEROTOPIC SENSORIALITIES

As an interdisciplinary and international worldwide group of 8 scholars, we would like to bring to your attention this new forum of research and share the results of our individual research in this session at the congress, in the perspective of turning this experience into a new possibility to enhance our collaborative research in the future.

The research group will address impermanent phenomena of spreading sensory territorialities (Byzantium and the West) of ineffable stimuli through ritual actions and visions within art history and outside it; at the crossing of both art history and visual culture, to promote new disciplinary forms, such as archaeologies of soundscape, scentscape, and other somato-scapes of ceremonial and power, sentience and enchantment.

We study ritual and meta-objects in paradoxical spaces defined by the metastability of the medium – both material and invisible – in transient motion. We explore the cluster of “scape-sentience-motion” within the emergent topologies (chorology & hierotopy) of radiant objects, fleeting visions, shimmering presences, dazzling visions, and acoustic sensations; of light and darkness, of matter, and proto-matter (chôra), of dancing light, and glowing words as effects/affects of premodern Byzantine and Western qualia.