Iya Kiva – ‘Is there hot war in the tap?’

‘Is There Hot War in the Tap?’ is a silent adaptation of a poem by Iya Kiva.

What is water? What is war? Where does it flow, what forms does it take? How can a person emerge through catastrophe? Where does life begin? Where do voice, subjectivity and agency appear? What is the nature of suffering? How do we confuse heaven and hell, light and darkness? Where lies the boundary between the personal and the collective? 

Through the stories of three characters, each experiencing their quiet, fundamental catastrophe, these questions – and many more – are left for the viewer to explore. 

Each experience is unique, yet when placed side by side, the stories of these characters form a mosaic of the human and the humane. Silent yet speaking: the voices of the characters are absent, yet the edge of silence and the almost-emerging voice opens a space of encounter, calling for a response that bridges the historical and the personal, the documentary and the intangible, the unspeakable and the spoken. Emerging at the crossroads of poetry and short film, the work tries to create a new language for reflecting on our time.

The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.