On the question of measurings

Since I arrived in Britain, measurings have been a real issue. I tend to get quite confused with this distance measuring system in feet and miles and weight in pounds.

It brings me to a very dear question to myself and very present in my work. It isn't just a different system, it is a whole different aprehension of what is measurable, a cultural statement.

Measurings can almost be the language that we give matter to speak to us and for us to reply back, conceiving its dimensions and making judgements and evaluations over its existance.

The chosen system, or idiom, is a statement in itself of how one, or a group of people, put themselves towards matter.

This reminds me of a story I heard once about a tribe which counted only up to the number 3. Beyond that, they would quantify according to the tone of their word for "many". For example: "I have many children", "there are maaaaany stars in the sky!". What is very coherent and logical. The principle is that all they need is 3 numbers and an inprecise concept of many. And that they use and don't conceive, exactly by lacking its necessity, a more precise quantification system.

This thinking, unfolding from the previous post (1/2), brought me to Walter De Maria's work "The Broken kilometer" (1979), in which in the floor of a large room (shown on the pictures bellow) 500 polished metal tubes of 2m each are shown aligned in five rows.

I've allways felt very atracted to this work, but the more and more stronger presence of mathematics in my work has been bringing me back to it, and this whole situation of exception, of feeling almost as if the space behaved differently, since I can't fully understand the local measurings, has suggested exotic apprehension of the dimensions that surround me. And obviously, comming from that, a space that conforms itself differently, as if language was reshapping matter.