Walking on Marble:

Materialized Histories

Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

 

Imagine for a brief moment your body is surrounded by soft stone.

 

This stone marking the space you are in, is marble. It was excavated in the early 20th century, most likely somewhere in the Aegean archipelago. Before its extraction, it was contained inside the earth for millions of years. If you sense the ground now, I invite you to close your eyes, just for a moment, and bring your attention to the flooring below you. You are standing on 700 square meters of soft black marble. Marble is a generous material, a porous stone, highly receptive to the atmosphere surrounding it. Humidity and dryness directly influence the stone.

 

Marble is a metamorphic rock: it is formed under some of the most extreme conditions known on earth. This is how marble comes to exist: Imagine deep, deep inside the earth a limestone rock is resting. Limestone consists of layers of skeletons and shells of marine animals that become lithified over millions of years. As the crust of the earth changes with tectonic shifts and other geological events, the limestone gets folded underneath the surface of the earth, and moves further down until it reaches the borders of two tectonic plates. The pressure generated by the depth and the tectonic collision, is intense and equal from all sides. The limestone can no longer hold its form or consistency. It starts to metamorphosize. The rock fuses with other mineral materials in its environment on an atomic level, in a process referred to as atomic migration. The appearance of marble records the entire history of its formation within the very structure of the stone. Different colors, veins, and grains of minerals are fused, rendering each rock unique in the process. For a brief moment in geological time, the black marble you are standing on now, was formed. For a brief moment in human time, a mine was extracted, providing the tiles you are now standing on. As the workers went deeper into the mine, they also went further back in geological time, and as we know, time alters the chemical structure of all matter. The deeper down into the earth, the marble began to change: in substance, color, texture and consistency. That is why the marble you just walked over, can never be found again, its original form has been altered and its source has forever been depleted.

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Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir

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Bodies Of Extraction

Published by

Kyklada Press 2022