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This talk, “God, Gifts, and Graffiti: Late Antique Church Assemblages and Temporalities of Sacred Space,” advances the idea that sacred spaces are essential cultural mechanisms for creating and for giving shape to particular forms of temporality—in other words, that we can think of them as important of time-making and time-structuring machines. It focuses particular attention on the concept of social time, understood as a lived, participatory mode of temporality that operates on the level of individuals and communities, real or imagined. The paper argues that we can access something of the social time of late antique churches through the various types of “polychronic” material assemblages gathered on their surfaces and in their spaces (architectural members, tombs, graffiti, liturgical silver, books, and other treasury items) that accumulated through and derived meaning from the combined contributions and traces of numerous individuals. The church building, on this reading, is seen as an interface between sacred time—outlined in sacred texts, endorsed by the monumental decorative programs, and reinforced with each liturgical performance—and the personal timelines of individuals and family groups, visible in the names and other kinds of marks of numerous, differently “timed” contributors. Ann Marie Yasin specializes in Roman and late antique architecture and material culture and holds a joint appointment in the departments of Art History and Classics at the University of Southern California. Her particular research interests include experience and perception of the built environment, decorative and epigraphic landscapes, commemoration, urbanism, material culture of religion, and long histories of display and reception of sites and artifacts.
Yasin received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at USC Yasin taught for three years at Northwestern University. Her research has been supported by residential fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. She was named a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2018-19.
Yasin’s writing on social and political dimensions of sacred architecture and art includes her first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more recent studies on memory and sacred landscapes, spatiality and perception of devotional graffiti, and architectural frameworks of early Christian relic installations.
Her current book project, "Re-Building Histories: Architectural Temporality from Augustus to Justinian," investigates correlations between architectural restoration and notions of continuity, change, monumentality and ephemerality from the first to sixth centuries CE. It analyzes cultural practices such as the literary, epigraphic, and visual representations of architectural destruction and renewal, the selective restaging of antiquities and architectural fragments, and patrons’ appropriation of earlier sites and commemorative forms to explore how the fabrics of cities gave palpable shape to temporal patterns and ruptures.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
60 George St, Providence, RI, United States, Rhode Island 02912
