having-seen-snake uses as its starting point an encounter between the artist and a garter snake. A surreal imprint of place and sensory experience is juxtaposed with an interview with a scientist centred around a new species of snake recently discovered in the Amazon. The scientist describes the process of designating a name and what it means to transfer something from the unspoken into the realm of the spoken. The film ends with the song of the Rothschild’s mynah recorded at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The bird, endemic to Bali, is currently on the brink of extinction due to poaching.

Sriwhana Spong is an artist of New Zealand and Indonesian descent currently living and working in London. She works across various mediums such as sculpture, film, writing, performance, dance, and sound. Spong draws on the writings of female medieval mystics, attempting to translate their ‘mystic style’ into films and sculptures that explore the relationship of the body to language, how it is written, and how it exceeds and escapes this inscribing. Spong work has been shown at Spike Island, Bristol, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, The Jewish Museum, New York.