This essay is aimed at a brief exploration of several intermedial aspects of the play Incendies by contemporary writer and director Wajdi Mouawad, who has shown a notable flexibility across multiple media and whose work often takes thoroughly intermedial turns. His writing joins together several media – text, mathematics, photography, virtual staging –, lying, at the same time, at the foundation of various renditions in other fields: staging, cinematographic adaptation, reading performance, or radio recording. The Collatz conjecture becomes a device for both questioning and mediating between the real life of a family and a land that are harrowed and terrorized by war, on the one hand, and an ultimate solution that proves as dilemmatic as inevitable, on the other.
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