Queering the marble

Queering the I L L U S T R A T E D

E S S A Y

Marble by paco díaz

ABPL_90421

Queering_the_marble Design, Philosophy, and Architecture

PROFESSOR: HÉLÈNE FRICHOT STUDENT: EDUARDO FRANCISCO DÍAZ LÓPEZ 1165045

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 > Abstract

3>

Concepts

5>

Straight reality

9>

Orientation

15> Disorientation

17 > Conclusion

19> Bibliography

1. Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski. “Deshaciendo la arquitectura: manifiesto de la arquitectura antirracista” [Undoing architecture: manifesto of anti-racist architecture], Arquine, published on October 8, 2020.

2. Beatriz Colomina. Sexuality & Space. (New York, N.Y. Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

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abstract

marble; queer; phenomenology; orientation; disorientation

Carrara marble has been used in our architecture since ancient times, so much so that it has been immersed in a neutral reality, where we ignore its origins and limit ourselves to judging its value by the use we give it. The straight line of its processes has made the reality of marble oriented towards a given truth, but what does marble need to return to the scene and really understand its reality and content?

Queer theory appears then as a challenging possibility to the straight line that we have adopted from patriarchy when analyzing the processes of materials; it is presented as radical and opposed to normalized trends in the world. The most rigid of the materials, such as marble, seems difficult to conceive of as queer because of its concept of fluidity, however, it is, since it tends to disappear (or misunderstand) just as it happened (or happens) with queer people, who fight for their visibility and to extend the perceptions of the world organized from a linear point of view, towards a new oblique (queer) reality. Queer theory then threatens to discontinue this straight line of given realities into a new “crooked” angle of knowledge1.

Examining the limitations of Carrara marble from queer theory opens the possibility of conceiving this material from a radical (queer) point of view, that is, understanding what exists behind this material and avoiding the linear logic with which it has been treated. that it has only managed to limit its realities in this world. Seeing materials as if they fell from the sky does not satisfy anyone2. The queer world appears then when the realities of the materials no longer appear, creating a new angle (or inclination) opposed to the linear logic that excludes, in this case, certain materials such as marble.

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concepts

Marble /noun/

a hard crystalline metamorphic form of limestone, typically white with coloured mottlings or streaks, which may be polished and is used in sculpture and architecture

Queer /adjective/

strange; odd. |OFTEN OFFENSIVE| (of a person) homosexual Straigth /adjective/

extending or moving uniformly in one direction only; without a curve or bend Orientation /noun/

a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings in relation to a particular subject or issue Disorientation /noun/

the condition of having lost one’s sense of direction

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3. Kathelijne Bonne. “El Marmól Carrara: del fondo del mar al taller de Miguel Ángel” [Carrara marble: from the bottom of the sea to Michelangelo’s workshop]. Gondwanatalks, 2020. https://www.gondwanatalks.com/l/marmol-carrara/

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straigth reality

Carrara marble has its origins two hundred million years ago, when southern Europe seemed like a great puzzle of islands. This coveted material has its origin in the water, when bodies of lime belonging to dead organisms accumulated at the bottom of the sea. When these marine animals died, they accumulated at the bottom of the sea, where the lime of their bodies resisted the test of time. Over the years, the layers of lime turned into limestone, and millions of years had to pass to form a large amount, and later, thanks to the movement of tectonic plates, the seabed was pushed up, forming the land we know today like Italy.

When the rocks move, they not only break, but are also exposed to great pressure and temperature, an essential process to form the marble we know today, since the limestone dissolves under these pressures, it becomes a liquid deforming the skeletons and finally crystallizes3. In this way we have marble, a translucent stone where its particular characteristic is its radiance. This is how the Italian peninsula was born and in particular the Apuan Alps, where we find Carrara marble.

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Carrara marble takes its name from the city where it is found in northwestern Italy in the Tuscany region. It is considered the most important center of the marble industry in Italy; considered prestigious for the white color that it has in conjunction with its gray veins, in addition to the fact that it has been faithful to great sculptors throughout history. The extraction of Carrara marble has very ancient origins; Its exploitation began in the Copper Age, and it was mainly used to make various objects, especially for tombs4.

It has always been considered a luxury material, but its uses have varied over the centuries. It has been used to build statues, columns, decorations, etc. and Christianity has been key to its trade and extraction, as countless sacred buildings have been built with this stone. Carrara marble has been chosen as the main element by the most famous sculptors in Italy and worldwide, such as Michelangelo5. One of the reasons for choosing this marble for the sculptures is because of its perfect anatomical adaptation that the sculptors were looking for.

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EXTRACTION Their extraction methods have evolved over the years. In ancient times, the extraction was done with wooden wedges, which were inserted into the natural holes to force it and break it. Later, the Roman system perfected this method and they were able to obtain blocks with desired dimensions, thanks to grooves that were used to break the stone. Subsequently, a helical wire was used, until today where they use a diamond wire6. With the latter, greater speed and precision is allowed.

TRANSPORTATION Formerly the blocks were transported dragging them up the slopes of the mountains. At the end of the 19th century, it began to be transported by train, where this railway connected the main storage centers, with the ports, and with the national trains. It worked like this until the creation of the highway system, where transport on rough roads was implemented in the middle of the 20th century7. Today marble is still transported by truck to ports and other destinations.

PROCESSES Most of the blocks are transported raw; the rest of the marble is reduced in slabs of different thicknesses, where after polishing it will be used for stairs, decorations and other uses. There are important sawmills in the provinces of Carrara and Massa, where the marble is cut and polished for future distribution8.

STORAGE AND DISTRIBUTION Currently, the marble is transported by truck to the port of Marina de Carrara where it is stored and distributed, either by air or sea. Most of the blocks are sent raw to the port, and shipments are organized from there9.

4. Bonne, “El Marmól Carrara”.

5. Bonne, “El Marmól Carrara”.

6. Bonne, “El Marmól Carrara”.

7. Bonne, “El Marmól Carrara”.

8. David, “Proceso de Elaboración del Mármol” [Marble Elaboration Process] , December 4, 2017, https://www. pulycort.com/marmol/proceso-elaboracion-del-marmol.html

9. Bonne, “El Marmól Carrara”.

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10. Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.

11. Susana López Penedo. El laberinto queer.

La identidad en tiempos de neoliberalismo.

[The queer labyrinth. Identity in times of neoliberalism]. (Madrid, EGALES, 2018), 4.

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orientation

Have we ever thought, why do we have that feeling of desire for materials, and rejection for some others? Why is it that when we think of Carrara marble we automatically associate it with luxury, cultural memory, even exaggeration?

Perhaps we are oriented to ‘love’ certain materials over others, but how does this feeling arise? How are we oriented to materials?

Phenomenology explains that when we have a feeling, it is because of something that caused it, it is not something that comes from nowhere. ‘When we feel fear fear, we feel fear of something’10. We can say that we are affected by the things that come into contact with us; our emotions then involve ways of orienting ourselves to the world.

The way we orient ourselves to the world has been guided by social factors such as race, sexuality, social orders, and it affects the way we relate to ourselves, but also to materials. Queer theory offers an oblique way, that is, an alternative to understand this orientation towards materials and exposes how our understanding is directed towards certain sides more than others. This theory proposes a resistance against homogenizing ideologies11.

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Carrara marble has been oriented towards an idea of ​​ luxury, culture and exuberance, a narrow line defined only by a few. This material is currently conceived as luxury, and it is that the impression we have of marble today has been affected by the impression they had of this same material in ancient times; the use in temples of the Christian religion, the creation of sculptures in the likeness of gods and white men, images to worship, which become impressions that continue to have an influence on us and therefore affect our impressions of this material today. This conception of marble is due to its orientation and the line of those who defined its use, but this orientation can change.

Proposing to reorient the current idea we have of marble, therefore, makes marble “disoriented”, so we would say that marble becomes queer. Reorienting the way we see materials allows us to understand how it is that our conception of things directs us to certain paths instead of others12. We can choose that a material that has been oriented to and from a linear path imposed by the majority, can be conceived in a new way. Marble can take a new direction.

We take certain directions towards the materials; ‘Perception involves orientations’13; we may like some materials more than others, some of us may associate them with social positions, others like certain luxuries, but we always take a position on them. To see the true material, we must stop seeing marble for its ‘use’14, that is, the use we currently give it. In this way, marble becomes one more material, and we can start from scratch a new perception of it through its physical characteristics and processes, leaving aside the false conception that we have created by following the orientation that we have been given implanted.

Carrara marble has its history since the Copper Age, and this includes the history of its extraction, the history of its transportation and finally its final destination. It could be described as a biographical and cultural history, showing us how the use of Carrara marble has been redefined over the years. In this way we would discover which attributes of marble are real and which are not, but, above all, discover the origin of these and the societies that have built this orientation. What makes a material ‘itself’ is what it allows us to do with it, so this ‘essence’ takes the material out of itself and takes it into a new reality15, a queer reality.

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12. Ahmed, Queer 13. Ahmed, Queer 14. Ahmed, Queer 15. Ahmed, Queer

Phenomenology, Phenomenology, Phenomenology, Phenomenology,

20.

27.

35.

46.

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Materials and space work together in architecture. They give texture, color and put our human senses to work. When we touch the surface of the marble, we are aware that it is available to us16; we relate it to luxuries since we probably find it in a very ostentatious place; other times, we can’t even touch it since we see it in a famous sculpture such as ‘David’. We then assume impressions and sensations in our bodies on the marble and once we see it in another context, our body repeats this effect. This is how we orient our body in some ways more than others. The materials guide us to how to live, how to feel. Carrara marble leads us to luxury, exclusivity, and culture.

The way we currently perceive marble, and especially how we use it, may have been affected by the gender roles that continue to drive us today. What we ‘do do’ affects what we ‘can do’17. The great works made with marble were made by male sculptors, as well as the statues of deities and temples to evoke the unattainable. It may be then that the use is limited by the regulations that we repeated and made us follow a straight line of use. A compulsory heterosexuality and the white race dictates what a body can do18, thus, the materials take the form of the norms that we have repeated over time, and from the hands of those who have done it. Why do statues made with ‘light’ materials such as Carrara marble predominate? Perhaps this material is attributed as the reflection of the men who produced the statue; privileged white men embodying their traits and aspirations. It is important to know the hegomony of ‘white’ to understand the invisibility of materials and go beyond the binary ideas of race, class and gender19.

But the material does not remain intact; marble expands through the spaces, which when living in a space where marble is present, can make us feel oriented to the ‘white’. The possible fusion of capitalism and racism carries a series of architectural implications20. The experience then of a black person in a space covered with white marble, would present a ‘disorientation’ and a feeling of denial. To be a ‘non-white’ person in the white world means to ‘diminish’ oneself as an effect of the bodily extensions of others21. Being a queer person in a straight world means disappearing from these bodily extensions to and from materials. The connection is broken towards minorities. White people are universal, queer people are not. That is why the importance of queer theory applied to materials, that is why it is important to understand this concept of disorientation.

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16. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 5.

17. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 60.

18. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 91.

19. Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk. “Becoming a Feminist Architect, visible, momentous”.

Field: a free journal of architecture”. Volume 7, No. 1, (2017). http://field-journal.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/01/1-Becoming-a-Feminist-Architect.pdf.

20. García and Frankowski.“Deshaciendo la arquitectura”.

21. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 138,139.

22. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 139.

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23. Rosemary Hennessy. Profit and Pleasure. Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, 2dn ed. (USA, Routledge, 2017), 113.

24. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 163.

25. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 164.

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disorientation

Disorientation as meaning is when a perspective is lost, but when that happens, a new experience is gained, which in this case would be the queer perspective.

Normally the word queer is used to describe something oblique or something related to gender orientation, and in this perspective it is used to mess up the order in which we know things23; more specifically, in deepening from the linear perspective the idea that we currently have of Carrara marble and what were the external factors of gender, race, sexual orientation and social status that helped build the linear perspective that we have about marble today. The queer perspective offers a new angle that disorients this perception.

The objects we make with the materials are extensions of our bodies; one man once created a white statue of a biblical character named David, and another created a white temple. So today a white man might feel pleasure seeing a wall in his house covered in Carrara marble, while a black woman might feel contempt.

Therefore, the materials are extensions of only some of our bodies. Materials become queer to the extent that bodies are touched by objects, even without being touched in a physical way. Imagine a sink bar made of marble; when the material fulfills the objective for which it was created, then it becomes one more material, because a chipboard bar would have fulfilled the function in the same way, but if we allow ourselves to feel something more than what it is supposed to do, then we can perceive a ‘personality’. We can allow ourselves to feel the coldness of marble, the smoothness and softness, creating a new personality that goes beyond its use, and thus the marble comes to life. When the materials come to life, they leave us their impressions24. Marble then comes to life through its formation, extraction, transportation and finally in how it comes into contact with us, and above all through the objects it allows us to make. Therefore, Carrara marble is a queer material, as it records how it can impress us through contact: the contact of the surface of the material with our body disorients us and we find a new path. This ‘encounter’ with our hands makes marble queer, because stories of disorientation emerge in our hands25.

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26. Dirk van den Heuvel, & Robert Alexander Gorny.“Trans-bodies / queering spaces”. Delft Architecture Theory Journal.

Volume 11, No. 2, (2017): 2. https://journals.open. tudelft.nl/footprint/issue/view/567/View%20Issue.

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conclusion Queer marble seems like a contradiction due to the fluidity of this concept versus the rigidity of the material, however, queerness happens when the bodies that are supposed to be kept apart meet and stop following the straight line that we have been taught. It is necessary to know its ‘straight reality’ to know how we orient ourselves to marble, and only in this way can we disorient it and then form new realities; a queer marble. This new reality can help us solve current problems of this broken world, since we can guide it to a better path.

Queer materials make contact possible between those who are supposed to live parallel to the ‘linear’ reality of our society, such as women, black people, queer people; the contact is physical between entities that should not cross. For example, the body of a non-white man who works in the extraction of marble, is in contact with a wealthy white person who produces marble statures, and finally a queer woman acquires this object. There are many ways to deviate from this straight line that has been imposed on us when choosing materials, however, it is not about creating a ‘queer’ line for these since we would go against its principles, but rather ask ourselves what our orientation is towards this new alternative that queer theory offers us when analyzing the materials.

It is important to know the ‘linear reality’ of marble, since we have pigeonholed it into a linear process of extraction-transportation-processes-storagedistribution; however little is said about its origins, properties and its history.

Queering the marble tells us about going beyond the story that a certain group of people tell us, in order to have a new criterion of choice. This theory also teaches us that materials not only exist to ‘please’ us, but also reminds us that materials ‘impress’ us; in this way we can change our perception; if we know of an ‘oblique’ alternative to the linear one, perhaps we can recognize the external agents that helped create this impression and thus be able to forge new impressions. What new impressions should we take on Carrara marble? As many as the very concept of umbrella that queer theory encompasses. Queer theory does not offer an absolute truth, but rather a range of alternatives to the straight line that we know when choosing materials; and importantly, people don’t need to be queer to ‘queer’ materials26.

In this way, perhaps we will stop seeing marble as a whim, luxury or another material from the catalogue, and perhaps we will be able to understand its essence and only then, it may be worth the story behind that choice; It will have been worth the animals that died in a sea that no longer exists, it will be worth the millions of years of waiting, and thus our choice will make sense based on a queer alternative, and not just on a given ‘truth’.

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bibliography

- García, Cruz, and Nathalie Frankowski. “Deshaciendo la arquitectura: manifiesto de la arquitectura antirracista” [Undoing architecture: manifesto of anti-racist architecture], Arquine, published on October 8, 2020.

- Colomina, Beatriz. Sexuality & Space. New York, N.Y. Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

- Bonne, Kathelijne. “El Marmól Carrara: del fondo del mar al taller de Miguel Ángel” [Carrara marble: from the bottom of the sea to Michelangelo’s workshop]. Gondwanatalks, 2020. https:// www.gondwanatalks.com/l/marmol-carrara/

- David. “Proceso de Elaboración del Mármol” [Marble Elaboration Process] , December 4, 2017, https://www.pulycort.com/marmol/proceso-elaboracion-del-marmol.html - Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

- López Penedo, Susana. El laberinto queer. La identidad en tiempos de neoliberalismo. [The queer labyrinth. Identity in times of neoliberalism]. Madrid, EGALES, 2018.

- Reisinger, Karin, and Meike Schalk. “Becoming a Feminist Architect, visible, momentous”.

Field: a free journal of architecture”. Volume 7, No. 1, (2017). http://field-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/1-Becoming-a-Feminist-Architect.pdf.

- Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure. Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, 2dn ed.

USA, Routledge, 2017.

- Van den Heuvel, Dirk, & Robert Alexander Gorny. “Trans-bodies / queering spaces”. Delft Architecture Theory Journal. Volume 11, No. 2, (2017). https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/ issue/view/567/View%20Issue.

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