Much of the Dutch relationship with the river has been shaped by control and survival. Centuries of engineering, extraction, and measurement have produced an intimate knowledge of the Rhine as a resource and a managed system. These technologies were never neutral. They produced specific worlds, severed kinship relations between people and water, and stripped rivers of the histories they carry. Even efforts to repair the damage, to purify, to restore, to manage more sustainably, can reproduce the same underlying logic of separation and control. This knowledge travelled with colonialism into occupied territories, reshaping rivers, erasing First Nations caretaking practices, and facilitating extraction economies across the globe. A different awareness is now growing, one that attends to the urgency of becoming together with the river, and that asks what it means to know the river otherwise. Da Cunha and Mathur ask in ‘Wetness is Everywhere’: “Is it time for a new imagination, a hydrologic one, that says that we do not inhabit a surface but rather a ubiquitous wetness?”

To know the river otherwise is also to attend to the time it carries. The Rhine does not exist in a single time: their waters carry alpine sediment deposited over millennia, flow through channels engineered over centuries, and nourish ecologies returning after decades of absence. Hydroformations attends to this layering as a condition of the river and of the research: what has sedimented, what has been severed, what is slowly returning, and what the river might yet become. 

Grounding the practice in direct engagement with the field, new methods arise through which to meet the river, attending to what the body can sense and what instruments can extend. The river is understood here as a lively assembly of actants, of fishes, mussels, sediment, plastics, chemicals, each with their own capacities and relations, shaping and being shaped by the waters they move through.

Doing this work requires more than one pair of hands, one discipline, one species of attention. Feminist posthumanist thinking has long insisted that knowledge emerges from encounter over distance, from being-with over the godsview perspective. Hydroformations takes this seriously as a methodological commitment: the research is shaped by the many perspectives, bodies, beings it moves through and alongside, and understands that commitment as inseparable from the practice of meeting the river on their own terms.

Funded by Mondriaan Fund in 2024-2025, activities so far entailed exhibitions, fieldwork, artistic experiments, and collective work through the Rhine River Lab, Confluence of European Water Bodies, and joining other river flows such as the Szenne river with Natural Contract Lab and Corpi Idrici in their Transgeographical Hydrobodies project. This living archive is a culmination of the research undertaken in light of this programme.

Our community and network are growing, and over time, so will this platform. We hold monthly assemblies, a bi-monthly exchange and discussion group, are actively working on new events and projects, and engage in writing for this platform.

If you feel called, join us!  Reach out to us with your ideas and intentions at mail@xandravandereijk.nl.

About Xandra van der Eijk

Xandra van der Eijk is a Dutch artist and researcher, interested in the fluid, networked actors that constitute waterbodies. Central to their methodology is the concept of Materiality of Place, a term devised to describe how site-specific actors embody ecological, cultural, and political worlds and how these can be uncovered by engaging in artistic fieldwork, material experimentation and technological mediation.

When not at work, Xandra practices earth stewardship over a 240m plot of land.