Becoming Marble: A Genealogy of Pentelic Matter and Mediterranean Materialism

A Genealogy of Pentelic Matter and Mediterranean Materialism

Abstract

Becoming Marble traces the shifting life of Pentelic marble across geological, architectural, political, and epistemic terrains. Rather than treating marble as a stable classical medium, the dissertation develops a genealogy of its successive stabilisations and disturbances, from object to surface to particle, showing how material processes and conceptual formations continually remake one another. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, alongside postcolonial critique and new materialist thought, the study articulates a Mediterranean materialism grounded in the Attic landscape. The first part, Classical Object, examines how Pentelic marble was consolidated as an aesthetic and political substance through architectural whiteness, neoclassical historiography, and colonial knowledge regimes, obscuring labour, exclusions, and racialised imaginaries.  The second part, Modern Surface, turns to the twentieth century, where marble operates as an interface within modernist abstraction and global power structures, organising visibility, legitimacy, and institutional authority while revealing the fractures of modern universality.  The third part, Material Particle, shifts scale to fragments, dust, and dispersed residues. Through archival research, quarry ethnographies, and material encounters at Mount Pentelicus, it foregrounds matter’s own tendencies and agencies, challenging subject–object logics and linear material memory. Across these movements, the dissertation argues that Pentelic marble does not simply link antiquity and modernity but actively participates in their continual reconfiguration. By moving from the monumental to the particulate, Becoming Marble proposes a rethinking of architectural materiality attentive to entanglement, heterogeneity, and genealogies without fixed origins.