Minute 57

 Minute 57 (by Jasmin Salami Dehkharghani)

The project of minute 57 resulted from a combination of the minute’s visual aspect, which reminds of an old TV screen with its characteristic flutter, and the available sound that evokes a feeling of a video tape being played on rewind.  I engaged myself with the following question: When/where do we play something backwards nowadays? I noticed that usually if we talk about or think of the past, we go back in time and we live through old experiences from a new present perspective. Lifetime, in general, is based on three time phases: the past, the present and the future. People nowadays invest a great amount of their present time to either worry about their future or to think of their past. But the momentary state, the present, becomes secondary. We mentally guide through our lives with a subconscious remote that on first sight enables us to rewind and fast forward in life. But this is simply not the case. The present is now and as much as we sometimes want to, we cannot change the past or predict the future. If someone would have told us three years ago that a global pandemic would hit us, and hundred thousands of people would die, we would have considered them insane. But, in fact, it happened. The question arises why we spend so much time in our past. The problem is, it is not about the past, it is usually about the memory. The focus lies in the situations we have seen, the people we have met und the moments we have lived through. Our past explains why we are who we are. And although we already stated at several point during our presentations that time and moments are transitory, people try to save their past every day through videos, pictures, paintings or similar means. Everybody has their own way to deal with that issue. My very personal way has always been my writing. When I was seven years old, I started to keep a diary. And I still do it to my present day. In these almost 20 years several notebooks have been finished. My life story with all ups and downs is contained in these books. And when I want to go backwards I just need to grab one of my diaries and let my inner self emerge in my past.
In my present project I used three diary entries and created black out poems. I accessed old phases in my life through a present perspective. The process of “blacking out” can be compared to the film’s process of decasia where great amount of filming material is also “blacked out”. In contrast to the film, my process of “blacking out” was intentional. The product of this project is three black out poems that each carry a new, unique and very personal meaning. The sad and dull tone of the poems is a product of my current grieving process. Shortly before creating the poems, my father passed away due to cancer. This tragic event from my past belongs to me, my present and my future life from now on. It changed me and a lot of my own general assumptions and presuppositions of life. The changing progress from my diary entries to the new poems mirrors the process of decasia which is the central topic of the movie.