The session was guided by Anna Bierler, visual artist and “gatherer” within the lab. Throughout the week, Anna’s role had been one of quiet observation and gentle structuring, attending to flows, movements, and connections, while thinking carefully about how experiences, thoughts, and responses could be held without becoming extractive. Drawing inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Anna approached gathering not as taking, but as making containers capable of holding multiplicity, contradiction, and play.

During the lab, Anna had been sending prompts to participants at unexpected moments via SMS. Responses could be printed using a small receipt printer and placed onto the walls of the temporary workspace at POST. Over time, these printed fragments accumulated into a shifting landscape of thoughts: short sentences, questions, observations, forming a collective, non-linear archive. For this reflection session, the practice became the central activity. The group was invited to respond to a series of prompts, ranging from the philosophical to the very practical. Participants printed their answers and added them to the walls, where they clustered into loose constellations forming clouds of concerns, desires, hesitations, and emerging positions. Reading each other’s responses sparked conversation, disagreement, and recognition.

The prompts gently forced a slowing down and a taking of stance. What resonated? What felt uncomfortable? What proposals felt aligned with the river, and which felt imposed? The exercise allowed participants to sense their own positioning as well as the collective mood. This moment of reflection was crucial. After an intense flow of information, impressions, and embodied exercises, the temperature check provided grounding. It marked a subtle transition within the lab: from receiving to manifesting, from attuning to beginning to articulate. Rather than closing anything off, the session made space for clarity, doubt, and care to coexist, acknowledging that meeting a river is as much about listening inwardly as it is about engaging outwardly.

After our lunch break, the group spent time outside for a workshop with participant Martine van Lubeek. Read more about that here.