Talk + Gaming Workshop: Zoo as a Future Heritage|28 May 2025|14:00|Leiden University
2025-05-28 14:00 - 16:30 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, Leiden, 2333 AK, Netherlands
SIMMR (Student Initiative for Multimodal Methods in Research) is delighted to announce its first student-led event: a book talk/presentation by designer Terezie Štindlova, followed by a participatory gaming workshop by artist-researcher Yun-Pei Hsuing.

Event Description:
This combined talk and gaming workshop explores participatory art designed to engage the public in reimagining zoos for a better future. Zoos, as cultural and political constructs, have complex origins rooted in imperialism and power, and their heritage narratives are often shaped by anthropomorphic and human-centred top-down decisions. By diving into participatory modes of conducting design research, this lecture-workshop seeks to incorporate speculative thinking into communal acts of creation for reimagining zoos and their cultural heritage as constitutive of human-animal relations.
In the first part, invited artist and designer Terezie Śtindlova will provide a firsthand introduction to her captivating book, Zoo Index, which examines the (un)relevance of zoos and how they shape our gaze towards nonhuman animals, to ourselves and one another. Following her presentation, artist-researcher Yun-Pei Hsuing will lead a board-game workshop to develop design research methods where participants will explore alternative and speculative futures for zoos through various gameplay strategies.

Timetable:
14:00 – 15:00: Lecture by Terezie Štindlová: The Making of Zoo Index: An Introduction
15:00 – 15:15: Break (Tea and snacks)
15:15 – 16:30: Gaming Workshop by Yun-Pei Hsuing

Location:
Johan Huizinga Building, Room 0.11 (Journalism Lab), Leiden University (Doelensteeg 16. Leiden)

About the Artists:
Terezie Štindlová is a designer, one half of a non-workaholic studio Day Shift Office, a concrete office chair maker and a founder of the ZOO Index project. Her research dives into the (un)necessity of zoos in contemporary society in connection with current office culture, shedding light on the power dynamics of labour and control exerted through (human) design. She graduated from Werkplaats Typografie in 2023 and is currently based in Amsterdam.
Born in 1985 and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Yun-Pei Hsiung is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in Design Products. His practice focuses on creating tools and participatory workshops, using social sculpture to inspire collective action. His work frequently engages with themes of public space, social housing, neo-capitalism, and Taiwan’s geopolitical landscape. Additionally, Yun-Pei utilises drawing as a medium for self-expression, exploring and expressing his queer Asian identity.

Installation: How to Un(name) a Tree | Artist Talk + Panel Discussion + Walking Tour | 6 June 2025 | 15:15 | Hortus Botanicus, Leiden
2025-06-06 15:15 - 16:00 | Hortus Botanicus, Leiden, Rapenburg 73, Leiden, Leiden, 2311 WJ, Netherlands
SIMMR (Student Initiative for Multimodal Methods in Research) is excited to announce the second student-led event this semester, organised by MA student/researcher Xinrong Hu: the launch of artist Adong Zheng’s site-specific installation How to Un(name) a Tree, followed by an artist talk, panel discussion with curator Augustina Cai and walking tour by Xinrong Hu. Visitors are warmly invited to participate in this afternoon of shared dialogue, critical reflection, and collective (un)learning across artistic, scientific, and cultural perspectives.

Event Description:

Artist Andong Zheng’s long-term project How to (Un) Name a Tree investigates the contested identities of three morphologically similar pine species: Pinus taiwanensis (Taiwan red pine), Pinus luchuensis (Ryukyu pine) and Pinus hwangshanensis (Huangshan pine), the last of which is native to Anhui, China, Zheng’s own place of origin. In 2024, he encountered a Huangshan pine sapling growing in the “Chinese Garden” of the Leiden Botanical Garden. As a foreign species confronted with a different institutional and cultural audience, the work takes on a new “face”. The botanical garden, as a historical symbol of scientific modernity and imperial knowledge systems, becomes both the site and subject of intervention.
Thus, as a gesture of orientation and disruption, Zheng is developing a site-specific viewing installation around the Huangshan pine sapling. Visitors are invited to reflect on the tree’s taxonomic displacement and iconographic significance and its cultural, environmental, and geographical entanglements. Within this framework, the garden becomes a stage where global scientific knowledge and localised, indigenous understandings collide. The installation challenges epistemic universalism by unsettling the neutrality of Latin taxonomy and revealing its ideological foundations. Furthermore, by inviting viewers to engage in the embodied act of seeing, it further questions whether “unlearning” dominant systems is itself sufficient, or whether it risks reproducing new hierarchies under the guise of correction.

Location:
Orangery, Hortus Botanicus. Rapenburg 73, Leiden.

Bios:

HU Xinrong is currently an MA student in Art and Culture at Leiden University. As a writer and former editor at The Art Newspaper China, her practice focuses on questioning the narrative and representational relationship between text and visual art, as well as exploring alternative ways of engaging with art beyond institutional frameworks. Her writings have been published in ArtReview, LEAP, Ocula, and other publications.

Andong Zheng (b. 1992, Hefei, China) lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He received his MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and is continuing his studies in Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Working primarily with lens-based media, Zheng seeks to open up new ways of knowing that traverse rationality. He often starts from small traces such as a shadow, a marginal detail in an archive, or an unusual flower. These elements become points of departure for unraveling broader systems. Trained in engineering, he learned to focus on micro details within rigid causal frameworks, but this very training led him to question the larger structures they sustain. His work has been exhibited at numerous international institutions and galleries, including Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-De-France (France), the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University (USA), Times Museum (China), Ames Yavuz (Singapore), and ClampArt (USA). He was shortlisted for the 9th Huayu Youth Award (2021) and the 10th Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.

Augustina Cai is an independent curator and researcher, based in Den Haag(NL) and Wuhan(CN). She holds degrees in both Global and Comparative Philosophy and Art History from Leiden University. After pursuing a Mathematics degree at Wuhan University, she transitioned to work as an assistant curator for numerous contemporary photography and art exhibitions. She also worked at the Institute for Provocation (IFP), an alternative art space in Beijing that specialises in artist residencies and public programs for the community. She co-initiated Decolonial Being Network(DBN), aiming to reveal the coloniality of contemporary beings within everyday life, to imagine a decolonial future. Her other curatorial interests include: 1) The concept and activities of play as an alternative way of being, liberating us from the trap of rationality, arbitrariness, and enslavement; 2) alternative medical culture and its implications on different modes of perceiving and understanding human/nonhuman bodies.

My Want of You Partakes of Me| Film Screening + Discussion | 20 June 2025 | 18:45| Filmhuis Den Haag
2025-06-20 18:45 - 20:45 | Filmhuis, Spui 191, Den Haag, 2511 BN, Netherlands
We are delighted to host a screening of this film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner in conjunction with Filmhuis Den Haag. The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A moderated by filmmaker and researcher Bo Wang.

My Want of You Partakes of Me
(2024) 54 mins – by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner

The film interrogates digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, a process of physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and political dimensions. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialisation and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.

The film was awarded the Jury Special Mention New: Vision Competition, CPH:DOX.

About the filmmaker

Dr. Sasha Litvintseva is a London-based artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work since 2018 has been shaped by her ongoing collaboration with Beny Wagner. Her films have screened internationally at major festivals including Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, RIDM Montreal, Punto de Vista, and Edinburgh International Film Festival, among many others.

Her work has also been showcased at prominent art institutions such as Tate Modern, ICA London, Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and Mumok Vienna. She has been the subject of retrospectives at venues like Courtisane Festival, UnionDocs NY, and e-flux Screening Room.

Sasha’s films have received numerous international awards, including the Sylvestre Award at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at the Guanajuato Film Festival, and have been longlisted for an Academy Award. Her work is distributed by Square Eyes and the Criterion Channel, and has been featured in Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound, Frieze, and Filmmaker Magazine.

She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art and a PhD from Goldsmiths. Currently a senior lecturer in film at Queen Mary University of London, she was awarded the 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize. Sasha is the author of Geological Filmmaking (2022) and co-author of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (2021), with writing also appearing in e-flux and Environmental Humanities.

Discussant
Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam, as well as a member of ReCNTR’s Advisory board. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, Garage Museum, CPH:DOX, IFFR, Visions du Réel, LUX, Open City Documentary Festival, Courtisane, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Sonic Acts, Eye Filmmuseum, Sesc_Videobrasil, Sharjah Film Platform, among others. He is a recipient of major international awards, including New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, and Best Doc Short at Sharjah Film Platform. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at the ACC-Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018, as well as at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam.

Purchase your tickets here

Image Credit: Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner My Want of You Partakes of Me (2024)
