Minimal Particular is part of a series of photographic records based on the nature-culture divide. In a sterile, neutral setting, we see stones collected over the years circumscribed by a stylized white measuring tape without any sort of notation. The tape measure is made of plaster, a mineral compound that has been instrumentalized over time according to the most diverse canons, from arts to medicine, from agriculture to architecture, and here has the form of a totalizing and ordering instrument that contrasts with the logic of stones. The metric system is the first major measuring system not based on the human body: feet, inches, miles (from the Latin milia passum, “thousand steps”) find reference in the body as we know it, but the metric system claims for itself an unprecedented terrestrial axis. Thus, both mineralized objects, one embodying nature, and the other embodying culture create a setting for a confrontation. Measuring is linked to a kind of proactive fetishization that can quickly turn into productive paranoia because one measures to add, subtract, repair, change, replace, keep, annotate, equate, and all other operative actions that are practicable and that contrast colossally with the impractical unit of measurement that is the meter, first described and implemented in France in 1790 as the “tenth millionth part of a quarter of the Earth’s meridian”.
During the warm period of the French Revolution, the first notions of heritage protection appeared alongside revisionist rhetoric. To facilitate trade exchanges, the French began to use a set of regimented measures aimed at this accelerationism, hence the birth of this univocal international system of measurement that would remove any ambiguity. The white paper plane-line that appears in the image seems to want to put an end to this ambiguity, exchanging the vague and the undefined for taxonomic closure and rationality as it was done during the Enlightenment Age. The base unit, which is the meter, had not only to come to terms with being an in vitro measure removed away from its origin and repeated until exhaustion but also to have retroactive effects, setting the measure also everything that came before it. Under this sign of the irrecuperable, our vision became contaminated by this convention and we see here that the tape measure can no longer retract as we would expect, there is a technical draw but there is nothing technical about it. Everything is closed in on itself, which does not alter the impediment that was already installed by default – we are in a regime of opacity, of refusal before an unexplainable or uninvestigable measure, and it us forbidden any kind of measurement and mediation. This is the modality that this group claims, that of the brute fossilization of distance that strikes and stalks the monopoly of any centralizing system established by a European superpower in the last decade of the eighteenth century.