The tenth annual iteration of Minute/Year began on 1. January, 2025. As in previous years, the change of the year also brings a change in location. In 2025, Minute/Year is installed in ausland, the “territory for arts and collateral damage” in Berlin, Germany.
Throughout 2025, from the beginning of January until the end of December, the work will record and layer one minute of audio, at 8:25pm — or, 20:25 — each day.
Minute/Year is a durational, process-based work, ongoing since January 1., 2016. A full overview of the work is available here — or else take a look at the introductory video below.
Each year, the spectrogram images that are generated by Minute/Year are posted online with a specific colour. This year, we will be returning to the colour that was first used in 2018 — a Prince-worthy purple (specifically, #5D0089). The work is structured in seven-year cycles, and we are now in the third year of the second cycle.
Minute/Year will also be printing each days’ spectrogram images from a receipt printer in ausland. Go there in person if you’d like to pick one up.
A further note on Minute/Year in 2025:
Minute/Year is a work that requires long timelines. Talks about it happen months or even years in advance. Such is the nature of this kind of piece. In 2024 the work was in Wesleyan University in Connecticut, USA, and now it is returning to Berlin.
So, as the calendar switches from 2024 to 2025, we find ourselves moving the work from the USA to Germany. We do not want this work to simply shuttle around the west forever, and especially not between the two states most responsible for the core support of the currently ongoing Gaza genocide. However, this is where the logistics of this work have ended up right now.
If you, dear reader, have proposals for places where the work could go in 2026 and beyond, please let us know. We would be eager for the possibility that the work would venture to somewhere in west Asia and northern Africa (or what is generally referred to as the “middle east”), but we are open to all proposals, anywhere in the world, as long as they are based in some kind of collaborative and solidarity-based approach of working with others as equals. Meanwhile we will save our pennies for the future and keep asking around. Who knows, it might still end up being in Neukölln next year, not Nairobi, but we live in hope. Free Palestine, free the world. That justice may arrive and the earth be made a common treasury for all.
