“WHY?” is a thought provoking short film created collaboratively by In the Trench Productions as a co-venture between an artist, poet, filmmaker and composer who each share a compelling interrogative response to our inherited history. Looked at retroactively, the First World War becomes more and more senseless as history progresses and yet ironically its shimmering image-echoes grow louder as it recedes further into the past. This is especially the case when distressing photographic imagery is sensitively choreographed through contemplating the distance between human beings: the very trenches that separate us. Conceived by Sonia Suvagau, Joachim Waibel and Sebastian Hugeneck and completed in a short period surrounding Remembrance Day, the film embraces archival footage and contains elliptical poetics which evoke some of the dream-like aspects of this global catastrophe. As a form of existential evidence of the need for peaceful co-existence, this cinematic poem evolved from a piece by Waibel called Epilogue to Forlorn Hope, a meditation on what he called “the beginning of the end”, and it explores several seamless ideas visually: accelerated quietness / the implosion of a feeling / the eruption of a nothing / the birth of a star. By examining difficult to gaze upon imagery of wounded soldiers and their severe disfigurements displayed bravely for both the historical camera and for our contemporary eyes, the film asks us to ignore which side was which and instead requires us to admit a basic human fact and dilemma: war is a raw eruption of fear. As a work of art this piece asks not only how history can continually repeat itself by why we seem to so easily let it do so. History has disfigured us all to some extent. Art is a loud interruption in our shared silence. This question is the selfsame “why” asked by the Dadaists in 1916, and as an artist Waibel will continue to repeat the question until a suitable answer is forthcoming.