Caroline Vitzthum


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Endling (2021), film, thermography, sound, 8 minutes, 44 seconds.

Endling is a digital work combining film, thermography, and sound, created during Caroline Vitzthum’s three-month residency with Somerset Film. The piece grew out of her ongoing interest in growing fibre flax and sustainable plant-based materials, informed by her background in bespoke tailoring and a wider engagement with community-based growing initiatives.

Developed during the flowering stage of the flax plants, the work captures a specific moment within the crop’s growing cycle, using it as a lens to consider flax’s broader ecological impact and its interdependence with insect life. In the UK alone, there are more than 27,000 recorded insect species – ranging from butterflies, bees, and beetles to dragonflies, moths, and many others. Yet recent research indicates that global insect numbers may have declined by 50% or more since 1970, with around 41% of species currently threatened with extinction.¹

The title references the term “endling,” used to describe the last known individual of a lineage, species, or subspecies. Once an endling dies, the lineage or species becomes extinct.² This concept underpins the work’s environmental concerns: industrialised farming methods, including habitat clearance, the use of herbicides and pesticides, and the irrigation and pollution of waterways, contribute significantly to insect decline worldwide. Fibre production, particularly when globalised and intensive, is deeply entangled in these destructive processes.

Through the combined languages of moving image, thermal imaging, and sound, Endling reflects on the fragility of ecological systems and the urgent need to reconsider our modes of cultivation. The work situates flax within a complex web of human and non-human relationships, highlighting how agricultural choices reverberate far beyond the field.

Special thanks to Richard Tomlinson and Somerset Film for technical support, and to Ignite Somerset and Arts Council England for financial support.

1 Source: Goulson, D., Insect declines and why they matter, South West Wildlife Trusts
2 Term “endling” first proposed by physicians Robert Webster and Bruce Erickson in a 1996 correspondence to the journal Nature.


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Screenings & selected film festivals up to current date:

2022
Moving Image Cinema Caravan, Alchemy Film & Arts Festival, UK

2022
LOCAL/GLOBAL Communities of Care, Stroud Film Festival, UK

2022
Braziers International Film Festival, Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research, UK

2021
Somerset Film at The Engine Room, Somerset Art Weeks, UK 

© Caroline Vitzthum, 2025. All rights reserved.

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