We have been taught to regard stone as inert, lifeless, and immutable, but narrative details in the natural history of the lithosphere challenge the explicit rending of the world into organic and inorganic precincts. The emergence of geomicrobiology as a scientific discipline has disclosed the involvement of microorganisms in geological and geochemical processes, fomenting an indivisible relationship between the living and nonliving. Microbial life not only influences the formation of stone, it is also an intractable agent in the transfiguration of lithic surfaces. If we imagine the founding of Rome in geomicrobial terms, the city began not in 753 BCE with mythical demigods suckling a she-wolf but a half billion years earlier in a sedimentary adagio of bacteria and skeletal remains that settled on the seafloor and around the mouths of mineral springs, resolving through compaction into a calcareous family of limestones. These substances—enlisted to form the monuments, palazzos, bridges, and aqueducts of Rome—are subject to endless renegotiation through the metabolic function of microorganisms that inhabit their surfaces. The biological patinas of their acids and enzymes perform small acts of etching and accretion, altering the collective poché of the city.

Etchings and Accretions proposes an empirical exploration of the formative stones and their transfiguring surfaces that compose the city, ranging from the depositional affairs of calcium carbonate in Roman aqueducts to the limescale in quotidian plumbing, and from biological patinas on marmoreal structures and public fountains to sites of active travertine formation such as Terme di Saturnia and Bagni San Filippo.

The Rome Prize Fellowship will provide an opportune moment to expand a long-standing preoccupation with the transformation of the substances of the world in time and space, into the microbial inimitability of Rome, with the aim of producing a series of dynamic artifacts and accompanying essays that explore the interdependence between the monumental and the microscopic, the animate and the inanimate.