Oriana Confente, Sofia Di Gironimo, Thai Hwang-Judiesch, Désirée Nore, and Hannah Silver
End of the World Research is a research-driven art collective based in Canada. Together, we blend scholarly and creative approaches through multidisciplinary activities. As young people living through ecological and political crises, our existence is intertwined with massive waves of change and the erosion of everyday life. Instead of being paralyzed by climate doomism, we’re embracing the curiosity and transformation that ending a world entails, with hope of better understanding what’s happening and where it can lead us.
Oriana Confente is a writer, film photographer, and maker-of-things based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, Canada). Confente completed a Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Communication Design at the University of Waterloo in 2020, where they began developing research-creation projects. Their practice continues to be research-based and explores concepts connected to posthumanism(ish), sustainability, and digital media.
Instagram: urghleshmeck
Sofia Di Gironimo is a student living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal, Canada). They are interested in revolution, psychoanalysis, and the pursuit of a life of leisure. They are currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Communications at McGill University, where they focus on Queer Negativity, Sadomasochism, and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Negotiating the intersections of theory and personal/political life practices, they explore the boundaries of self-and-beyond, meaning-and-nonmeaning, everything-and-the-big-Nothing-at-the-centre-of-it-all.
Instagram: sofa_digs
Thai Hwang-Judiesch is a Korean-Canadian writer, poet, multi-disciplinary artist and all the rest. Her work focuses on possibility, transformation and love at the end of the world. As we witness the decay and foreclosure of possibility in capitalist ruins, endings are the conditions of living and dying at this point in time. Her works interweave endings with her specific experience and perspective of loss and diaspora, the temporality of colonization, the strange world of the internet, Korean shamanic mysticism, magic, liminal spaces, and portals. Her undergraduate thesis was on Lagging: Diasporic Remembering on the Internet, focusing on memory work and diasporic loss onlines with her specific theorization of “lagging” as a racialized temporal orientation to the internet. She has a personal newsletter (Notes on Here and Elsewhere) hosted on substack and is the co-host of the podcast Before We End.
Instagram: digital.mystic
Désirée Nore Duchesne is a community organizer, a researcher and a troublemaker. They obtained a Master’s in Sociology, writing on oral histories of the anti-Austerity movement in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) under the Canadian Research Chair of the Sociology of Social Conflicts in 2022. Involved in different collectives and affinity groups, their research plays around contemporary social theories, queer and peagan praxis, and post-situationnist disturbances of the quotidien. Nore is currently researching the barriers resulting from transmisogyny through the lense of the Politics of the Commons, with Québec’s Sexual Diversity and Gender Plurality Chair. They are also researching the history of French-Canadian queer folklore music and the concept of disappearance through the history of the Laurentides in rural Québec.
Instagram: chouchous_priestess
Hannah Silver hopes to do many things. For now, she’s researching the far-right, collecting data on how public servants use twitter, and reading by a lot. She recently graduated from McGill University with an Hons. B.A. in Political Science and Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justices Studies.
Instagram: hannsilver