The project received funding because of:
The project is highly relevant when it focuses on working in the changed circumstances, caused by the coronavirus. By facilitating digital activities, the project reaches over national questions to solve problems on a global level. It witnesses how the pandemic affects contemporary art and culture.

The applicant wrote about the project:
Zoom 2020 is a pilot project that aims to organise a digital poetry festival with 26 Nordic poets from every poetic genre. The project takes the starting point in the social anthropologist Hylland Eriksen’s thoughts that epidemic makes us pull back and reflect on effects caused by changes in the world. The coronavirus becomes thus a new lens which makes it possible to see new ways to organise the society in the future. The project aims to study which role the pandemic has to work of poets and how it affects poetry.

It becomes more and more important to witness and document contemporary happenings - cultural, social, mental and political - in new written forms. There is a clear tendency in the literature to document, witness and represent such happenings that creates cultural trauma in the society. Zoom wishes thus to invite participants to reflect on their thoughts on the first six months with the pandemic and, at the same time, to present poetry that is created during this period. Contributions will present broadly such genres as rap, performance, film, concerts and more traditional readings. This will reach a diverse and broad audience. Zoom will even organise discussions and debates that focus on the corona crisis and its influence in poetry.

Artists can find new ways to find solutions in a global crisis. In the project, the Nordic partners and participants will contribute to this development by grounding on a Nordic fellowship. Furthermore, the project will expand international and multicultural activities, and it renews languages in the Nordic region. Forum 2022 changes our ways to see the world by connecting the invited poets to international contexts. The digital form of the festival will make it possible to reach broadly the international audience.

The project is grounded on the premise of global challenges. It is thus important to facilitate meetings that reach over national borders for developing poetry - both ideas and ways to express. Poetry can spread around like a benign virus; like a new hope.