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Annex: Persijn Broersen en Margit Lukács - video-installatie bij De botanische revolutie

Fix the Variable, Exclude the Accidental, Eliminate the Impure, Unravel the Tangled, Discover the Unknown

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.

Image: sketch, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács.