THE ARCHIVIST (classifier): Is in charge of presenting the archive. Wears a fake mustache.

THE NON-HUMAN POLYMORPH (classified): Wears black. Alternates between (in order of appearance) DEAD SPIDER, CAPYBARA, EXCITED DOG, MONKEY, BIRD, BUTTERFLY, PYGMY MARMOSET, BLUE FROG, EURASIAN SPOONBILL, STORK, HERON. Only appears on video projection.

THE LECTURER (reader): Is the main narrator of the lecture and is in charge of the equipment. Does not wear a fake mustache.


This performance is imagined as set in THE LECTURER’s artist studio located at Het Zicht 60 in western Den Haag. It is a sizable room with a large window stretching across the northern wall and which gives onto the street. The entrance to the studio is also on the northern wall. The audience is invited to sit facing the window of the northern wall. They are surrounded by three white walls. Each wall is covered in tracing paper. In front of them is a desk and a large projection screen behind it, covering part of the window. To the right of the desk is the entrance. To the left is an opening in the floor and a staircase which leads down to a small basement.

Most of the dialog is recorded and played over speakers while the characters lip sync the text. Sometimes the text is spoken live. This will be marked in italics.





(Enter THE LECTURER through the door.)

(over speakers) The Artis Library is located on Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam. The closest tram stop, the one I got off at on Thursday May 6th, is Plantage Lepellaan. Upon arrival, we are asked to wash our hands and leave our bags in lockers downstairs.

(THE LECTURER sets down their coat and bag, wipes their hands with a towel. Begins setting up the projector.)

(over speakers) Once we have our laptops and recording devices stacked in our clean hands we head up the curling wooden stairs. We enter the reading room, small in comparison with the university buildings we are used to frequenting. The walls are covered in dark wooden shelves climbing up all the way to the mezzanine which is off limits to us and appears full of boxes and more books, maybe waiting to be processed into the collection. At the far end of the long room is the curator’s office above which hangs, on the railing of the mezzanine, a very large portrait.

(live) Carolus Linnaeus watches over us as we sit down in the center of the room.

(THE LECTURER puts on THE ARCHIVIST’s fake mustache and turns away from the audience)

(over speakers) Between the shelves are busts of other seemingly patronal figures of the ARTIS institution.

(THE ARCHIVIST fixes his hair and straightens himself before addressing an invisible interlocutor)


(over speakers) Dick Hillenius, biologist and poet, one Mr. G. F. Westerman, one of the three founders of the Royal Zoological Society of Natura Artis Magistra and the first director of the Amsterdam Zoo, and Charles Darwin, so-called father of evolution. Patronal is correct, as it relates to their roles in the protection and support of the ARTIS institution and to the value that is attributed to their accomplishments. Patron comes from “patroun” "a lord-master, one who protects, supports, or encourages.” It comes from the Old French patron "patron, protector, patron saint" and directly from the Medieval Latin patronus "patron saint, bestower of a benefice; lord, master; model, pattern, example." It also derives from pater (genitive patris): "father."

(THE ARCHIVIST continues pacing and mouthing words but is no longer matching the text of the recording.)
(over speakers) That they act as the permanent residents and hosts of the Natura Artis Magistra archive gives us an idea of what we might find here, what kind of knowledge, its form and standards. The Natura Artis Magistra archive, the Archon’s house, the leader’s administration stretches beyond the architecture of the reading room. It has shaped the forms in which animals are kept, their cages and their names and the order in which they are seen.

(THE ARCHIVIST keeps mouthing an agitated monologue with the invisible interlocutor. Exits down the stairs to the basement. Enter THE LECTURER through the door. THE LECTURER sits at the desk. Finds a pair of scissors and starts meticulously cutting into large pieces of paper.)

(over speakers) We sat down and were presented pillows and small velvet weights, indispensables, we are told, for handling much of the material stored here. We are not allowed to use pens or to have any kind of food or drink with us. Everything is in its place and despite being allowed to speak we whisper, bewitched by the sense that we are intruding. In more ways than one. Despite the spoken and unspoken rules of this place, deep in the strange contrast between the warmth of the wood that covers everything and the aseptic numbering of things, the smell of old leather and brittle paper and the immaculate cleanliness of all surfaces, I find an intruder. As I make my way through the plaster busts to name and categorize them myself, I crouch beneath a table where some metal vases and other things I would be inclined to call artefacts were labeled with paper tags. On the floor was a hollow rectangle made of the same paper as these tags. On it–some numbers or letters, I don’t remember.


(live) Inside this item, the only one out of place, it seemed, was a spider, dead on its back. Its legs were folded all together in the air.

(THE NON-HUMAN POLYMORPH appears as DEAD SPIDER on the projection screen. The video is set on a theater stage. The video cuts between DEAD SPIDER walking around the stage and DEAD SPIDER on its back, legs in the air.)


(live) How interesting, I thought, that this animal, performing the archival gesture of filing itself away was still out of place here in the library.

(over speakers) I wondered what would happen when someone preoccupied with maintaining this place would find it. I left it there because I am not one of them and this intrusion made me smile. Maybe the corpse would remain there for a long time and fester and alarm the staff and invite more critters and the library would run amok with insects and invertebrates. But most likely it would be found and thrown away.

(THE LECTURER has finished cutting out the outline of a spider. Walks over to one of the three walls surrounding the audience and pins the cutout to a sheet of tracing paper.)

(over speakers) Because for all their research the patrons of zoological classification found it irrelevant to allow other-than-human beings to decide for themselves the names by which they are known and the relationships they are allowed to have with one another. The truth of these things is held in books, and the animals themselves live in labeled cages. I do not know where they file away the dead ones.

(THE LECTURER walks back to the desk and sets down the hanging tools. THE LECTURER takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter off the desk and exits through the door. THE LECTURER leans against the large north wall window and lights a cigarette.)

(over speakers)The ARTIS library is attached to the Amsterdam Zoo. A door separates the building’s lobby and the inside of the zoo, the path that goes around the Capybara enclosure from what I can remember.

(Clips of CAPYBARA appear on screen, followed by and alternating between EXCITED DOG, MONKEY, BIRD and DEAD SPIDER)

(over speakers) The door is unlocked and it seems expected of me that I should not dare open it and roam the zoo like an excited dog. I rest my hand on the handle. Yes, unlocked. But I would like to come back and I assume that secuity cameras abound in this knowledge/animal house. House as in construction and recipient, as in content and form, noun and verb. Just like the monkeys and the birds in the free-roaming rooms of the zoo, I understand where I am and where I must remain. There are places I may not enter and things I may not touch. The monkey and I have been trained, it with physical incentive or punishment, me with capital incentive or punishment. Or maybe the monkey has no interest in walking on the concrete path and much prefers the lush of the banana leaves and the canopies created for it in the steaming greenhouse. But even in the butterfly room where the animals saturate the air they have no interest in humans. We are not a part of this environment. I try to stand absolutely still but none of them will land on me. Even as I yearn to disappear between the hibiscus and the jasmine, even as I attempt to file myself away, I am intruder.

(THE LECTURER has finished their cigarette, enters the room and sits down at the desk. Starts cutting into paper again.)

I went to visit the ARTIS zoo on a sunny afternoon when the library was closed. It was a wednesday I think. My first instinct was to record, in my notebook, the information I deemed relevant: the number of placards identifying the animals in the giant maze of the zoo and the number of placards which mentioned the rarity of the species, its impending extinction or any conservation effort related to the exhibited specimen. I had entered another archive and I started to categorize. At first, faced with the bird enclosures, I remained very much on the outside of things, recording, following my line of argumentation.

(Clips of BIRD appear on screen, alternating with clips of DEAD SPIDER)

(live) I looked at the animals critically and thought of the neo-colonial crux of the conservation field, the well-hidden accumulation of land and resources operating under the white narratives of rarity and biodiversity. I was soon completely overwhelmed, however, with a kind of joy that sprouts in the gut and holds the lungs.


(live) When I came face to face with a tiny monkey in the ape house, a pygmy marmoset, I was completely entranced.

(Clips of PYGMY MARMOSET appear on screen, alternating with clips of BIRD, MONKEY and DEAD SPIDER)


(live) It held onto a long branch hanging down from the curved ceiling not a meter away from my face. No fence or window between us–I wanted to cry. In the free-roaming rooms, among the monkeys and the birds, children in neon vests are free to run and scream as they like. They are very good at spotting the animals so I follow their small herds, the tiny extended indexes and shrill exclamations of victory. They run from one end of the house to the other in swarms that surround me. How lucky they are. I want to cry again. In the reptile house I am better at finding the creepy crawlers.


(Clips of BLUE FROG appear on screen, alternating with clips of BIRD, MONKEY, PYGMY MARMOSET and DEAD SPIDER)

(live) I point out a small blue frog to one of the children. A few moments later the boy runs back to me and grabs my hand, he wants to show me something. We are both drunk with the same excitement and the overwhelming joy of sharing it with a stranger.


One of the only enclosures visible from the outside of the zoo houses the Eurasian spoonbills, or Lepelaars in Dutch, a reference to their long spoon-shaped beaks. We pass it each time we go to the ARTIS library and so, one day we decide to go look at them.

(Clips of EURASIAN SPOONBILL appear on screen)

(over speakers) We observe them for a while, in their ponds or perched up high on some metal constructions. At some point one of us realizes that one of the spoonbills has something on its back. It looks like a small box with a solar panel covering the top. I spot two members of the zoo

staff on their break having a cigarette in the heat of the sun. I excuse myself and ask them if they know what it is. “I can assure you that there are no solar panels on the birds,” one of them says to me, smoke lingering at the corner of his mouth. I point out the bird in question whom had kindly stayed near the edge of the fence. The zookeeper is confused and tells me he has never seen this device before. “I will ask our bird specialist,” he says, perplexed but kind, “come back in a couple of days and I will let you know.”



(live) Unfortunately, I did not meet this man again.



The following text is part of the Spoonbills or Platalea leucorodia entry in A Dictionary of Birds by renowned ornithologist Alfred Newton,


(over speakers) consulted a couple of days later at the ARTIS library reading room:

(THE ARCHIVIST picks up an imaginary book and reads from it, lip-syncing)

(over speakers) “The Spoonbills form a natural group, Plataleidae, allied, as before stated (p. 456) to the Ibididae, and somewhat more distantly to the Storks. They breed in societies, not only of their own kind, but in company with Herons, either on trees or in reed-beds, making large nests in which care commonly laid four eggs,--white, speckles, streaked or blotched, but never very closely, with light red. Such breeding-stations have been several times described (...)” (Newton and Gadow 1893)

(THE ARCHIVIST keeps mouthing a monologue to the audience but is no longer lip-syncing)

(over speakers) I think about the enclosures I have seen. I think about what it means to live your whole life surrounded by the same handful of people. I think about the boy who took my hand and all the other times I shared a thought, a word with a stranger or an alien, something still unknown. I think about recognition and sustenance of the self.

(over speakers) The entry that precedes the entry for Spoonbills is the entry for the Spleen.

“SPLEEN, a small pulpy mass of oval or worm-like shape, and generally of a bluish-red colour, which in most Birds rests upon and is loosely attached to the right side of the proventricular or

glandular stomach; but the form, size, position and colour of this organ, which apparently plays an important part in the economy of the blood-corpuscles, vary much in different birds.

In French one who “has the spleen” is someone who is in mental or emotional distress, often characterized by a numbness–someone who is seized by a kind of depressive state. It comes from old european medicinal beliefs that the spleen was the “seat of morose feelings and bad temper.” In Le Spleen de Paris, Charles Baudelaire writes about solitude–that it is fundamental to human nature. (Baudelaire 1864, 52)

(Exit THE ARCHIVIST into the basement, still mouthing a monologue to himself. Enter THE LECTURER through the door. THE LECTURER picks up a roll of tape and walks over to the audience. Spread accross the three walls are now pinned 5 cutouts of other-than-human beings: a spider, a Spoonbill, a Pygmy Marmoset, a monkey and a dog. THE LECTURER uses tape to draw long lines between and around the cutouts.)

Another famous french saying echoes this and seems to characterize the spirit I grew up around: “l’enfer c’est les autres,” hell is other people. And yet isolation, we know, is torture for social animals like the human. Humans, like other creatures such as parrots, have names, contact calls, because we need to call upon and be called upon. To be recognized. I often think that the way our names are said, pronounced, with what intonation, with what rhythm, shapes much of how we perceive ourselves. To be able to hear ones name called upon, by a friend or a stranger, so that one might be dependable, might be able to give and receive in return, sounds like the basis of dignity. This fictional and flimsy debate is irrelevant to the 7 or 8 spoonbills in their enclosure. They are never alone and most likely spend their whole lives with the same cell mates.

(THE LECTURER has finished agitatedly putting up tape. The cutouts are now surrounded by rectangular outlines. The audience sits in the middle, able to observe this contraption, flatly proposed)


It turns out that the solar panel on the spoonbill’s back is a tracking device. In the wild, spoonbills are extremely elusive, they are seldom seen twice by the same researchers. So these same researchers have mounted these contraptions on captive birds to track their behaviors and establish patterns. (Artis 2025) To establish patterns on birds in captivity, in a cage with barely enough room to glide, who seem to in fact refuse patterns in the wild. Interesting.

The End.




Artis Zoo. 2025. Words cited from a printed sign next to the Spoonbills enclosure. It is possible that this sign was added after my encounter with the smoking staff.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1864 “Le Spleen de Paris : Poèmes en prose .” Revue de Paris 8: 52–53.

Newton, Alfred, and Hans (Hans Friedrich) Gadow. 1893. A Dictionary of Birds. London: Adam and Charles Black.



In my current research I have been interested in examining the cultural narrative of conservation and its relationship to issues of knowledge and value production. I have been trying to further my writing practice by combining fiction and academic research, utilizing the world-building potential of methodologies like critical fabulation to question reductive narratives of other-than-human life. This project was an opportunity to experiment with inserting field work into my writing. I used a methodology of association by which the physical space of the Artis library archive was the material starting point of my research. I recorded my experience of the archive through handwritten notes and let my research and knowledge of conservation politics and the classification and categorization of other-than-human beings guide me physically and epistemologically through the archive. This led me to the Artis zoo and reflections on the narratives that are allowed to be created about animals. Namely that they largely operate under two categories: the reproductive story and the consumptive story. It is no wonder that the highest order of classification for biota is the « Kingdom » and that the archive is the « Archon’s house » , the leader’s administration. Throughout this story I propose associations of information based on my exploration of the Artis archive in order to draw out parallels or incoherences which can form freely in the mind of the reader.

Through the format of the performance lecture I explore the simplification of complex life that operates under Linnaean classification. I am inspired by methodologies which deal with epistemic and physical constructions which are mirrored in the social and the spatial/geographical, I explore the architecture of the archive. The different characters allow me to dissect the way the physical space of the archive is constructed, where its various agents are allowed to exist. By playing with live and recorded text/speech, I look into the agency of the archive as a standalone architecture, a self-serving logic, a performance: what the archive does, houses, protects and what narratives are shaped by the embodied experience of the field. By inserting viewers into the flattening ontology of Linnaean classification with a loose reference to Foucault’s Panopticon formation, I attempt to draw the attention back to a relationship between the architecture of power and performance.