WORK IN PROGRESS

Not the End of the World is a 34-minute video piece combining lecture performance, puppetry, stop-motion animation, and data visualization. It grew out of my attempt to repond to climate anxiety without turning away from either the fear or the facts. I wanted to ask how we can stay informed without drowning in doom, and how we might move from paralysis towards clarity, agency, and action.

We are surrounded by climate stories that focus on disaster: fires, floods, heat waves, extinction, and collapse. These stories are real, and the grief and fear they produce are real, too. But they are not the whole story. Alongside the crisis, there are quieter and less visible narratives of change: cities being redesigned, laws shifting, new technologies emerging, emissions falling in many places, and solutions beginning to work.

Not the End of the World draws on the research and writing of data scientist Hannah Ritchie. Her work challenges fatalistic climate narratives without denying the urgency of the crisis. I use deliberate silliness alongside a deliberately analogue and handmade visual language that resists the slickness of contemporary digital imagery: handwritten signs, hand-drawn and hand-formed data, puppets, props, and stop-motion sequences in which my hands remain visible as I shape the material world of the piece. Data becomes something that can be drawn, held, and moved—and thus perhaps, understood. Complex environmental research becomes tactile, playful, and close enough to touch.

This is neither toxic positivity nor greenwashing. Rather, it is my attempt to make space for urgent, pragmatic optimism: the kind rooted in evidence, responsibility, and the belief that we can still help shape the future.