PⒶWPⒶW

Ceel Mogami de Haas explains his concept: "When I was asked to curate this The One Minutes Series, I was reading a lot of poetry, particularly ecopoetry which is poetry with a strong ecological emphasis. I strongly bonded with poets who explore the relationship between animals and writing. Unlike other disciplines within the arts and humanities, poetry oftentimes goes unnoticed in the field of animal studies. A poet is not someone one would instinctively turn to in order to examine the relationships between human animals and non-human animals, for example.

"Could the poet be a keystone sub-species of Homo sapiens? The poet: an apparently useless creature, but potentially the saviour of ecosystems," writes scholar Jonathan Bate, extravagantly, in his book _The Song of the Earth_. First echoing poet W.H. Auden's disenchanted claim that "[p]oetry makes nothing happen", he subsequently attributes a salvative calling to the vocation. Despite Bate's comical taxonomic revision, poetry is still often understood as something frivolous or innocent, if not "barbaric".

I respect the somewhat underwhelming statement of Auden, as much as I admire the bold faith in Bate's hypothesis.

When I read a poem, I like a little bit of both, a sense of assumed pointlessness sprinkled on audacious exuberance. My curatorial approach for The One Minutes sits somewhere between these two feelings. When poetry focuses on nature, and with it the larger communities of living organisms, it challenges the way we inhabit the world and calls for different prospects. Can "poetic thinking" initiate alternative relationships with animal populations inaccessible to other forms of thought? Maybe...

Since poetry can speak and reach beyond the circumscriptions of reason.

Translating all these ideas to video art was challenging and I want to thank all the humans and non-humans that made it possible. This series became in my eyes (and I hope in yours too) something like an "imaginary garden with real toads in them", as poet Marianne Moore would say in her own wonderful phrase."

Ceel Mogami de Haas is an artist living and working in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Geneva (Switzerland). His work spans a wide range of media, from sculpture, drawing, writing, and artist's books to installation and video art. He also co-founded the artist-run space One Gee In Fog in Geneva and is a member of the Bookstore community programme in Amsterdam. His current artistic research explores the relationship between writing and animals, with a preeminent focus on wolves, literary wolves and werewolves, and he examines interspecies storytelling as an alternative practice of world thinking, world building and world sharing.

With contributions by Florent Meng, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Juyi Mao, Manon Bachelier, Sophie Popper, Sarah Burger, Calli Uzza Layton, Heleen Mineur, Erin Fussell, Constanza Castagnet, Ellie Kyungran Heo, Megan Hadfield, Ivan Cheng, Almanza, Giovanni Giaretta, Alyona Larionova, Felix Klee, Stelios Markou Ilchuk, Anne-Charlotte Finel, Teun Grondman, Joaquin Wall, Mathieu Arbez Hermoso, Siobhan Leddy and Benjamin Yates, Cécile Tafanelli and Daniel Vorthuys, Anna-Bella Papp, and Nicolas Momein.

_PⒶW_ was made possible by the generous support of Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Pictoright Fund and Sandberg Instituut.

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), rhw National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík (Iceland) and the 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 moving images. Museums and cultural organisations around the world subscribe to the series. Send in your videos and participate in the project!