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Marmarization

Summary: The titular neologism of cinema-of-marbles. Mademli's coinage for the process by which film stock and other moving-image heritage is transformed into national-cultural monument — a metamorphic process (after the geological metamorphism that produces marble from limestone) that is then claimed to apply equally to digitization.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, primarily section 1.1.1 ("Memory takes root in the concrete," lines 217–373); reprised throughout chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Etymology and the lapsus

The term is built from marmaron (marble), used as a metonymy for Greek classical antiquity and the durable building/sculpting material. The author deliberately keeps the alliteration with memorization — "a substitution interestingly automated by the correction algorithm in an average word processor" — to suggest that mnemotechnics, like marmarization, is a system of innumerable parallel micro-movements that pile up into something that looks solid.

Three registers

The dissertation introduces three strands of marmarization, presented as co-existing rather than mutually exclusive:

  1. Marmarization as national property. Film becomes subject to "a one-directional attribution of meaning for the needs of weaving a national narrative — this process is anchored not in the field of representation, but in the treatment of its medium technology in terms of (allegedly collective) property."
  2. Marmarization as institutional gatekeeping. The custodians of film "invoke its fragile materiality to entrench measures of security, to control public access to the performance of the filmic object," with the discussion of safety operating "on a double register, suggesting the need to protect different manifestations of the sovereign."
  3. Marmarization as metamorphism. As a geological process driven by pressure, heat, and water, marmarization signifies the profound change of an object in constitution and form — and as such, the term explicitly extends to digital restoration: "the term marmarization also applies in the radical process of digitization."

Why digitization is the central case

A core claim of the dissertation is that digitization is not a rupture from analog monumentality but a continuation of it by other means. The Manakia digitization at the 70th FIAF congress in Skopje (2014), the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum's NRRP-funded database redesign (2022), and the Archipelago Network's Cyclades platform are all read as moments where digital tools deepen rather than relax archival fixation. This is what marmarization names.

Marble vs marbles

The book's title operates on the slip between marble (singular, monumental) and marbles (plural, mobile, accident-prone, decentered). Marmarization is the verb of the marble side; "playing marbles" in the final paragraphs of chapter-4-crisis-ecosystems is the antonym Mademli proposes.

Sister concepts

  • boundary-archive (Star/Bowker's boundary objects relocated into archival practice — a counter to marmarization)
  • Immutable mobile (Latour / Law) — the marmorized object that travels while retaining its internal state; the dissertation treats it as the conceptual frame marmarization radicalizes.
  • Mangle of practice (Pickering) — also a metamorphic process, but generative rather than fixing.
  • double-structure — the formal mode in which marmarization plays out.