The Rhine River Lab: Meeting a River was a five-day interdisciplinary laboratory that invited artists, researchers, designers, and other practitioners to enter into a temporary contact zone with the Rhine River in Arnhem. The lab set out to explore how artistic research might enable new forms of relation, grounded in listening, sensing, care, and reciprocity. The lab builds on an understanding of the Rhine as an entity in its own right: a living, material, historical, and political presence.

In the Netherlands, the Rhine is inextricably linked to narratives of control and survival. Centuries of engineering, regulation, and extraction have shaped not only the river’s course, but also the tools and languages through which it is understood. While awareness is growing around the urgency of becoming with rivers in times of ecological crisis, many of the methods currently available continue to reproduce anthropocentric frameworks.

Open call

The open call for Meeting a River invited participants who are interested in challenging these inherited modes of engagement. It welcomed practitioners from diverse disciplines (artistic, academic, embodied, and technical) who are willing to work experimentally, collaboratively, and attentively. The lab proposed the floodplains of Arnhem as a particularly dense site for this exploration: among the oldest floodplains in the Netherlands, layered with human histories ranging from early settlement and river worship to clay extraction, stone production, nature development, and contemporary urban expansion.

The open call was met with an overwhelming response, leading to nearly 200 applications. After careful review and consideration, the team expanded the number of available spots from 10 to 13, as well as creating two extra spots for academic researchers, bringing the total number of participants to 15. All participants had a strong connection or motivation for wanting to work with the Rhine.

Looking back

Across five days, participants developed personal and collective relationships with the Rhine through its material presence, historical records, and contemporary contexts. Activities moved between in-situ encounters in the floodplains, archival research, material and sensory experiments, collective reflection, and public sharing. With Platform POST as a basecamp, the group meandered through the city, gathered and worked with river materials, designed rituals, exchanged methods, and allowed the river’s materiality to speak back.

The lab emphasised process, attunement, and the development of situated practices. A closing event, open to the public, was developed as an invitation to walk, listen, sense, and reflect alongside the participants, and to take part in an act of reciprocity toward the Rhine.

Linked items

The articles that are linked to the lab document the different moments of the Rhine River Lab: the symposium that set the conceptual ground, the immersion in the floodplains, the encounter with archival histories, material mapping experiments, moments of reflection, and the collective closing. Together, they form a layered account of what it might mean to meet a river as a presence with whom we are already entangled.