Dates: 8 – 12 October 2025
Location: Platform POST, Arnhem

Application deadline: Friday 15 August 2025 00.00 CET
Full open call:  [no longer live; this is an archived post]

The Rhine is the biggest river of the Netherlands, their waters flowing through and mixing with almost all Dutch water bodies. From a wet point of view, the Netherlands are soggy swats of land between streams and flows fanning out into the North Sea. It’s not strange then, that much of the Dutch relationship with the river situates around control, and survival. After all these years conquering the river, dominating its direction, measuring its flow rates, and optimising it for extraction, an awareness pointing towards the inevitability and urgency of becoming together is growing, and that, in turn, demands to know the river otherwise. Yet the tools currently available are developed from that old mindset, and working with them, despite good intentions, reproduces narratives of anthropocentrism.

Flowing from the long-term research programme Hydroformations that investigates the Rhine as an entity in and of itself, and that focusses on developing artistic methods that enable the river to voice itself, this lab will explore the tensions and multiplicities present in the floodplains of Arnhem, across social, political and ecological factors. The floodplains of Arnhem are some of the eldest of the Netherlands, and so many human histories flow together here. From the earliest settlements and Rhine worshipping to the visible remnants of clay extraction and stone production, and from the “floodplain as nature reserve” experiments to the “floodplain as space for urban development” reality of today, the question arises: who is the Rhine, how did they present themselves throughout time, and can artistic engagement with them uncover their needs, wants, complaints and demands?

In this lab we will be developing a personal relationship with the Rhine, specifically through its material, in-situ presence and context. Together we will be exploring the floodplains, the archives, exchange tools and methods, utilising mediation in service of representation. With Platform POST as our basecamp, we will meander through the city of Arnhem and listen, gather, collect, experiment, make offerings, design rituals, and let the materiality of place speak back to us. On the last day the lab closes with an open invitation to the public, and ourselves, to share findings, and hopefully, an act of reciprocity towards the Rhine.

What we ask: an open attitude, a practice already dealing with hydrology in some shape or form, a willingness to openly share tools and methods with each other, presence on location during all lab days, and permission to publish documentation of the process on the Hydroformations platform to be launched later this year.

What you get: a full programme including invited speakers, organised fieldwork and excursions, new tools and methods, the opportunity to build on newly formed relationships and projects in the near future as part of the Hydroformations network.

* Note: There is a small access fund available for artists in need who would otherwise not be able to join the lab. This can contribute towards travel or accommodation costs. 

The lab is an open invitation to learn, research, and create; no claim will be laid on what results from the process. On the contrary, it is the hope that the lab will foster new connections, collaborations, and valuable insights into this rapidly changing, intensive network of wet relations, and that its outcomes will meander freely through time and place.