For the ongoing project SPECIMENS, visual artist Marlies Lageweg focuses on Naturalis’ “economic plant and seed archive,” a library of materials from colonial history assembled by Dutch researchers and trading companies that helped open up the colonies. SPECIMEN reflects on the shift in thinking in terms of ‘Dutch mercantile spirit and economic interests to imperialism as part of a European capitalist system that flourished thanks to the exploitation of people, animals, plants and raw materials on a global scale. By stripping the economic label of the seeds and plants from the archive and placing them in a new context, Lageweg depicts alternative history stories. For example, a group of works around the rice grain Blaka Alesi that Lageweg germinated and cultivated and the manipulation of the Papaver Somniferum, which enabled the VOC’s trade monopoly in spices and contributed to the success of the world’s first multinational.