hot/cold is a poetic series of video-observations exploring thermal experience in a time shaped by climate change and shifting human relationships. Each piece begins with small, everyday moments: the memory of a touch, the quiet of an apartment, the landscape freezing behind a window. These micro-experiences resonate with larger systems – climate, catastrophe, loneliness, and the desire for closeness.
Warmth and coldness appear here as states of coexistence – fragile, unstable, and dependent on exchanges between bodies, emotions, and environments. Thermal tensions reshape language, allowing it to speak of the interdependence of everything living and nonliving, moving within a pulsing cycle paced by temperature.
The series draws its title and conceptual frame from the childhood game ‘hot and cold’. The video-poems reinterpret its logic of searching, tracing the distance between nearness and estrangement, between wonder and unease. The video form deepens this inquiry: colour, motion, and atmosphere make perceptible the relations between species, landscapes, and emotional states, revealing the subtle forms in which life and matter meet.
poetry and voice: Urszula Morga
visuals: Bartosz Mikołajczyk
The project is part of the subtheme Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction.
Author
Urszula Morga
Urszula Morga (Poland) is the author of two books for young readers: “Panda Bonia” and “The River That Searched for the Sea”. She won the 15th National Poetry Competition named after the poet Janusz Różewicz. A graduate of the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice and the Gdynia Film School, she works as a director and voiceover artist. She also runs the Esy-floresy animation studio in Gdynia. A fan of modernist architecture and Pokémon, she follows her own path like a cat but, like a dog, stays loyal to people rather than places. She believes in Nature. Her poetry collection “foundations” marks her poetic debut.
