Polyptych Chão Medido (Measured Ground) by Felippe Moraes, reflecting on the measurement and division of land.

Felippe Moraes
Chão Medido (Measured Ground), 2012
85 × 59.4 cm (each image)
Fine art photographic print
Ed. 5 + 2AP

The polyptych Chão Medido reflects on the civilizational impulse to measure, divide and delimit the land. By turning the ground into calculable units, we establish not only a technical system for organizing space, but also a deeply political logic of ownership, control and exclusion. Measured land becomes administered territory, a surface subjected to the ruler and to the boundary.

Yet what is measured and contained rarely accommodates the subjective dimension of human existence. There is something unstable about walking over ground that has been too precisely defined, as if the precision of calculation reduced the complexity of the experiences that unfold upon it.

In this sense, the work echoes a passage from João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Morte e Vida Severina:

“É a parte que te cabe deste latifúndio.
Não é cova grande, é cova medida.
É a terra que querias ver dividida.”
— João Cabral de Melo Neto, Morte e Vida Severina

“This is the share that falls to you from this vast estate.
It is no oversized grave, it’s a grave made to measure.
It is the land you so wanted to see divided.”
(free translation)

Between measurement and destiny, between the ruler and the grave, the ground reveals its harshest dimension: what is divided to organize the world is also what delimits the final resting place of each body.

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