MEDIDAS*

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The Egyptian Stone Foot

I found it lying on a heap of stones, sorted by size.
I brought it with me to Porto.

Weight: 2.3 kg.
Length: 24.2c”m
Width: 11.2 c”m
1 foot = 30.48 centimeters
Geopolitical time: unknown

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TIMELINE
RELLI DE VRIES

Wandering sands from far away, assembling along the Mediterranean shores in Palestine/Israel.

The sand grains, up to 2 millimeters in size, were once solidified rocks in distant Africa.

At their crossing with the Nile along their journey to the sea they cracked, moved all over, broke up and disintegrated.

The water smoothed the facets of the fragments.

The sand was led into the Mediterranean, eastward, with sea waves and winds joining to turn them northward.

They were emitted along the Western shores.
Mixed in the sand were little pebbles,

more than 2 millimeters in size.
The smooth brown stones came to the
Palestine coast from Egypt.
Builders of Israel, the new country, solidified the pebbles into the stones of the houses in various shades of brown:
The brown of the flint, the clearer lime stones, the quartz of the solid granite rocks, and the brown Nubian sandstone that travelled along the Sahara-Arab desert plains and re-hardened in the sediment of the rocks.

The Aswan dam slowed down the movement of the sand.

New sort of demand was created by the modernist fashion of granolith flooring and the passion for the brown.

The brown pebbles now reached Israel not by geological forces, but by economic exchange, branded and sold as the Egyptian stone.

The granolith fashion turned into a contemporary archeological stratum.

Day and night mechanical nets separate the pebbles,
sorting them by size
in the quarries near the Israeli-Egyptian border.
The sound of the machine spreads in the ancient spaces, that knew the upper streams of the Nile and the withdrawal of the Tethys Sea underneath.

Heaps of selected stones stand now side by side,
creating a temporary new topography,
till a hidden power would move them away.

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*Technical Unconscious: a word (Medidas) provoked me to connect geology and technology, to find the movement and whereabouts of the stone and the cane through times.