We were welcomed by Tom Willemsen, public engagement officer at the Gelders Archief, who introduced us to the institution’s history and mission. He spoke about the archive as a living system that preserves and mediates regional memory, and then turned to the presence of the Rhine within its collections. Much of the geographical material, he explained, was lost during the Second World War, leaving only a limited number of historical maps. Rather than presenting this absence as a deficit, Tom framed it as an opening and an invitation to look elsewhere in the archive for traces of the river.

He guided us through the many ways the Rhine surfaces across different types of documents, offering a broad overview of records related to water control and land reclamation, trade and taxation, agriculture, industry, military conflict, ecology, and population. These materials testify to the fact that people in this region have always lived with the river, whether through cooperation, conflict, dependence, or control. The Rhine, it became clear, is not only a natural phenomenon but a cultural and political one, deeply woven into everyday life and governance.

Before entering the reading room, Tom highlighted a selection of archival materials that might resonate with the questions of the lab. He concluded his presentation with a closer look at some of the remaining historical maps of the Rhine, specifically for how they frame the river. These maps, pulled especially for us, were already waiting in the reading room alongside instructions on how to navigate the archive’s digital systems and request physical documents. Once inside, participants followed their own paths through the archive. Staff members retrieved documents as requested, and conversations unfolded organically between participants, with Tom, and with the materials themselves.

As we leafed through records, patterns began to emerge. We noticed how language used to describe the river shifted over time, how administrative decisions were justified, and how the idea of the river as something makeable (engineerable, controllable, optimisable) appeared remarkably early in the archive.

At the same time, these documents revealed past identities of the Rhine: as border, as threat, as resource, as infrastructure, as possession. Through legal texts, correspondence, and reports, fragments of lived experience surfaced, suggesting moments of care, fear, dependence, and adaptation. Somewhere between the lines, and across centuries of record-keeping, another kind of river-voice began to emerge, mediated through human concerns, ambitions, and anxieties.

The visit to the Gelders Archief made visible how deeply the Rhine has been shaped by narrative, administration, and power, and how these histories continue to inform present-day river management. By engaging the archive as a site of encounter rather than authority, we began to read the Rhine as an entity whose past relations might help us imagine different futures of living together.