UCL Culture Lates: Snakes & Ladders

Snakes & Ladders, a UCL Culture Late on Thursday 30 January, which turns the Grant Museum of Zoology into an atmospheric, fantasy adventure drawing on the storytelling tropes of Jumanji and Indiana Jones, surrounded by oryx and impala trophy heads, a Royal Bengal tiger, a quagga, kangaroo and pangolin, toads, termites and other specimens.

Developed by Sacha Coward, renowned escape room designer and queer folklorist, each participating visitor becomes a member of a fictional television film crew making a documentary about the discovery of a new species of snake in a mythical rainforest, taking on one of five randomly assigned characters, each with its own background and privileges. Each player takes on the guise of a white male presenter, local researcher, black scientist, LGBTQ+ cameraperson or older white female academic, rolling the dice, and moving across a giant illustrated board stretching the length of the museum, following a tailored set of instructions and solving cryptic clues related to colonialism, imperial power, collecting and racial prejudice. Throughout the evening UCL Science Collections Curator Hannah Cornish will be on hand to impart knowledge on the snake specimens in the collection, and award-winning poet Yomi Sode will perform a new poem inspired by the Displays of Power exhibition, the Grant Museum and its collections.

Snakes & Ladders at the Grant Museum links to the current exhibition, Displays of Power: A Natural History of Empire, which highlights the museum’s role in the story of the British Empire through the animal specimens on display.