Born out of the artist’s imagination of a fictional world of female-like creatures, one of the works of Aisha Al-Abdulla is a miniature of sculptures seated in the courtyards of the first girl’s school in Doha. With their large eyes, placed against their small bodies, some stare at me as I walk down the corridors of Liwan and remind anyone passing by about our threatened ecological communities. Their eyes pull you in, reminding you of questions around environmental rights and how far we have pushed those rights.

Even though Aisha’s fantastical creatures may seem human-like, they are imagined in a habitat far from us. Each character has its idiosyncratic sensibility to our environments, while collectively mining practices of care and repair to our earth. In her “Above The Clouds” installation, we meet Raincoat Girl made with delicacy and materialized using fragile materials. The process of making Raincoat Girl deviates from the conventional representation of anime characters: it offers an alternative lens to the world-making of anime, one that combines the practices of arts with the actions of environmental justice and activism.