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."