The perception of nature and the construction and manipulation of the landscape play a prominent role in the work of Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács. For the Annex, they made a new work based on the collection of exotic plants assembled around 1737 by George Clifford III (1685-1760), an Amsterdam-based banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. The Swedish bot-anist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) classified these plants according to his own system. However, he did not necessarily base his classifica-tions on an objective observation of the plants, but on an idealised version.

In the video by Broersen & Lukács, these individual plants come to life as a fierce crowd and threaten to break free from the strait-jacket imposed on them. Swaying in a gentle breeze, the replicas come to life and try to break out of their straitjackets like a savage, menacing mob. Together with concert pianist Daria van den Bercken (1979), the duo has made a compilation of musical pieces that takes this manip-ulation even further. Stirring music transports us into a romantic illusion that is abruptly broken by a protest song by the revolutionary com-poser Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021), who used the piano as a tool for transformation.