Petermann sonified the datasets directly. The disappearance of glaciers became a falling line; rising global temperature became an intensifying tempo. The scientific facts arrive as music — recognizable as facts, but rendered in a register that bypasses argument and lands in the body. The composition fills the space as a single uninterrupted soundfield from the moment the audience steps in until the moment they leave.

Within that field, three screens. Tarek's contribution is a visual labyrinth built from 350 still images that move forward and backward in time across the three channels — drawings whose imagery interweaves data visualization with biblically-inspired scenes of apocalypse and collective belief. The hand-drawn line refuses to translate the data; it answers it. The viewer watches what science describes, set alongside what humanity has long imagined an ending might look like, and the page between the two pulls open.

The work is conceived as an emotional vessel for material that would otherwise remain abstract. A sensorial bridge. A warning made physical, but more than a warning — a space in which adaptation and reconciliation begin to feel like possibilities a community might find together rather than alone.

The first edition opened on 2 November 2022 at The Factory in Cairo (formerly Townhouse Gallery). Days later, Waking The Giants was presented within the Swiss Pavilion in the Blue Zone at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh — the official negotiating area of the United Nations climate conference, where the work entered the room in which the policy itself was being debated. The trajectory of the project, from a private conversation in Alexandria to the Blue Zone of a UN summit, is itself part of its argument: that a community's reckoning with climate change can hold its scientific, artistic, and political dimensions in the same frame without surrendering any of them.

The project is ongoing. The next edition will move further into community engagement and participation, expanding the work from installation into something the public is asked to enter as collaborators rather than witnesses.