Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács

The artist duo Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács are graduates of Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, they went on to complete their MFA at the Sandberg Institute and were artists-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Their installations and films have been widely shown at major institutions and international biennials, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Centre Pompidou (FR), FOAM (NL), MUHKA (BE), Kröller-Müller Museum (NL), MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA), WRO Biennale (PL), HKW (DE), Biennale of Sydney (AU), Rencontres Internationales (Louvre, Paris), and Wuzhen Biennale (CN). In 2024, they represented the Netherlands at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.

Broersen & Lukács’ artistic inquiry is rooted in a deep engagement with media theory, art history, and mythology. Drawing from cinematic, scientific, and historical sources, they reimagine landscapes and natural phenomena through digitally layered environments. Their work often reflects on the politics of representation and the appropriation of nature—reconfiguring dominant narratives through fragmented, multi-perspective storytelling.

Where the River Sings (working title) brings together stories, science, ecology, and non-human voices. It started with X.B. Saintine’s Mythologie du Rhin (1862), where rivers speak, trees judge, and people turn into animals or ghosts. These old myths opened up a way of thinking about nature that feels urgent now—one where humans aren’t at the center.Together with Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and her Climate Imaginaries research group, we’re building a solar-powered, local, slow-AI story generator. It connects Rhine myths with today’s ecological data and more-than-human perspectives. The stories it creates will be gathered in a publication, alongside contributions from writers like Nat Muller and others working in climate fiction, science, and history.During our time at Odapark, on the edge of the Meuse-Rhine region, we’re developing a character to give this story machine a voice: a contemporary troubadour. This figure drifts between human and nature, myth and fact, data and dream. Through this figure, the river speaks—personal, poetic, and constantly changing.The stories that arise will become the base for a film, where the troubadour travels the Rhine, singing its past and future—part storyteller, part spirit of the river.