This question was definitely also on Anne-Flo’s mind when they explained to us their artistic practice and approach to writing these beautiful yet tragic stories. Anne-Flo seems to have put an immense amount of work into researching all the archive material on pandas that are produced on a daily basis. They use this material to write speculative though fact-based stories which invite us to explore scientific and philosophical questions in an alternative way. As an audience, we were confronted with shock after shock learning that pandas in captivity are monitored 24/7, get trained to poop and pee on specific places in their confinements, and are electroejaculated or artificially inseminated with such scientific and cold precision, that they seem to lose all interest in sexuality whatsoever.

The reasons for this quickly get a conspiratorial undertone. Especially, learning that there was a highly fortuitous coincidence between the selling of ’gay panda’ shirts, and a rather unfounded Wikipedia page edit claiming that pandas sometimes show homosexual behavior. How much of the human-panda relationship is merely an opportunity for commodification, and what is left of the panda as an animal when all of its behaviors are meticulously controlled by its caretakers, for the sake of reproduction and cuteness? 

​

Luckily, Anne-Flo’s research is not solely about shock factors and asking unanswerable questions about something as metaphysically slippery as relationships. They also explore other themes, and my barrage of why’s, how’s, and how about’s was gladly met by their expertise. We learn that pandas practice an eroticism that shows interesting similarities with that of human beings. That they are sometimes very hard to pin down as either boys or girls, seeing that their genitalia are often indistinguishable by even the experts that surveil them 24 hours a day. That they will go to extreme lengths, even holding in their pee, to deny keepers the ‘pleasure’ of collecting the samples. Why all this fuss and refusal? Maybe because pandas are very spoiled animals, plausibly because no one – whether human or animal – likes being messed around with that much.

​

​

Our night ended with a writing workshop where the audience was invited to put what they learned into practice. Kees produced one of the most abominable newspaper headlines about pandas ever known to man. Thom wrote a quick but enjoyable poem on panda love (if you know what I mean…), and Annebel reminded us all that however cute and cuddly pandas may be, there is always a cuter yet deadlier commodified animal: Mowgli the house cat.