ABSTRACT: Mosaic floors from the House of Cilicia at Seleucia Pieria, a port near Antioch-on-the-Orontes, depict topographical personifications of the territory of Cilicia framed by those of the rivers Tigris and Pyramus, among other personifications that are now damaged. Fitted together from colorful cut stones, these figural assemblages draw together place-based materials and the personhood of topographical elements. Drawing on legacy data from mosaics excavated in the 1930s and dispersed to institutions across North America, this essay argues that the afterlives of these mosaics remap the environments that they personify in modernity and, thus, craft hyperreal networks of relation to enact forms of distributed personhood.

The art and literature analyzed within this cluster act on and with their audiences, exploring how artists and writers have continued to think about and engage with reproductive freedom—often while flying under the radar of mainstream control—and situating abortion within a deep historical framework of reproductive justice that remains relevant and urgent in the present.