"within the minutes on an advert" is the title of a poem by Christian Sinicco and has also become a short film in which the epoch-making phenomenon of migration and the recurring, repeated, unresolved humanitarian catastrophe of deaths at sea become an opportunity to come to terms with one's own (false) conscience, in the conviction that only by formally, conceptually, explicitly addressing this cemetery in the water at the foot of Europe can a poetic work capable of speaking to contemporary humanity be accomplished.
Thanks to the work as interpreters at migrant reception centres and the direct knowledge of life stories and experiences related to migration, the collective has direct access to the stories, images, visions and also, of course, the traumas and griefs of those who have reached our comfortable shores and now come to terms with integrating and adapting in a new society, finding small communities of compatriots, learning new languages, and processing painful experiences through therapeutic paths. "within the minutes of an advert" then becomes a video-poetic journey in which a series of portraits of these new presences in our society question our own identity and stimulate reflections on the meaning of reception and the encounter of often remote codes and languages, in which the bridge-language of the post-colonial heritage is the medium.
The measure, the programmatic duration of an advertisement is a provocative indication linked to the audiovisual format that par excellence concentrates the elements of attraction, the promise of emancipation through economic well-being for individuals forced into misery and often dazzled by a mystifying narration of western reality. the project will therefore be an elaboration in video-poetic form of the words and images that we will collect during interviews and workshops, preparatory to the realisation of a series of video-portraits capable of condensing heterogeneous and extraneous elements of life that we do not want to ignore or abandon at the end of the sea.
As attached material you will therefore find the incipit of this journey, the initial portrait.
The project is part of the subtheme Re-imagining identity through poetry.
Author
Poetipost68
The Poetipost68 collective, founded by Elisa Donzelli, is made up of a (non)-generation of contemporary poets, a heterogeneous group that, starting from a web platform, aims at confrontation and collective dialectics with poets born in the same years through the publication of critical interventions, essays, poems and increasingly opening up to languages such as photography and video.
