When Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta first conceived Fragile Future in 2007, dandelion seeds were glued one by one onto hand-soldered LED circuitry. Eighteen years later, the piece has grown into the studio’s most requested installation — and the most difficult to move.
For the museum’s opening configuration, the team rebuilt three full rooms of bronze branch-work from scratch, sourcing seed heads from a single field in Zeeland to keep the color consistent across thousands of individual dandelions.
“Every seed is placed by hand, under a lamp, by someone who has done this for years,” says studio technician Mila de Groot. “There’s no shortcut for that kind of care.”
The result is a set of rooms that visitors describe less as sculpture and more as weather — a slow, glowing field that responds to the presence of people moving through it.