Everything happened so much: archive as poem in an age of perpetual witnessingEverything happened so much: archive as poem in an age of perpetual witnessing

"There are different ways to tell a story. I wanted to think about the way we bear ongoing witness to our own lives, and how this material tells bigger stories about the material, technological and socio-economic circumstances of the past and present. I wanted to think about what this seeing might be saying; to think about what we don't see, but which is always there anyway. I wanted to give space to the unreliable narrator and the chaos of memory. To take seriously the political dimension of telling stories through the low fidelity, poor images and unobjective close-ups that we are often left with in contrast to sovereign forms of cinema as verité (newsreel, advertisement, video-essay). Building on these ideas, in reconnaissance and reclamation, here are 24 video-poems, as true and accurate as any other form of storytelling, or perhaps, right now, even more so. This open call was conceived in the early months of 2020. By the time a selection was made, a global pandemic was underway with 170,000 dead (and counting). The final selection was chosen in part to reflect [on] this, as thousands of lives are reduced to numbers on an infographic: the messy data of living, here in solidarity and love." - Jesse Darling, April 2020

Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. They live and work in Berlin.

Toni Brell, Lauren de Sa Naylor, L'nique Noel, Sulaïman Majali, Francisca Khamis Giacoman & Levi van Gelder, Cristina Planas, Frank Wasser, Kamilya Kuspanova, Lin Li, Ibrahim Kurt, Samar Al Summary, Rozemarijn Jens, Nestor Solano, Andro Eradze, Ghenwa Abou Fayad, Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer, Torreya Cummings, Pernilla Manjula Philip, Stelios Markou Ilchuk, _monkii, Callum Copley, Louise Gholam, and Flo Ray

The One Minutes Foundation produces and distributes one-minute videos from an artistic point of view, offering an international stage for people to create, engage and connect. The One Minutes is active at the forefront of international contemporary art, as well as in education and welfare. It has exhibited at Power Station of Art (China), the National Gallery in Reykjavík (Iceland) and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (USA), among other venues. Every two months, The One Minutes Foundation puts out a new series of 60-second films that investigate how we perceive and engage with the moving image.