As an opening act, before any discussion or framing could take hold, we walked together toward the Rhine to greet the Rhine River. Guided by Rhian Morris, we softly attuned to the location by grounding ourselves in the moment, in our bodies, and in meeting the river as it was that day. The intimacy of our relationship with the Rhine became immediately apparent as construction works along the embankment stood as a material reminder of how closely the river is entangled with human intervention, control, and care. Each of us received a coin, following an ancient custom inviting us to offer hopes, dreams, and wishes as a gift to the river. Holding the coin, we took a moment to contemplate what we might ask for or entrust to the water, before continuing our walk down to the riverside.

There, anthropologist Phebe Kloos shared insights from her work within the Dutch water authorities. Speaking from her position at the Waterschap Rijn en IJssel, she offered a first glimpse into how water management is organized in the Netherlands, outlining its dominant technical narratives and governance structures. At the same time, she spoke about her role as an anthropologist within an institution historically shaped by engineering logic and how she has fought for space to introduce a hydrosocial lens that recognizes water beyond a natural resource, as a deeply social, cultural, and relational element. Carrying this first embodied and institutional encounter with the river, we returned for lunch and the afternoon symposium programme, feeling the awareness that the Rhine had quietly set the terms of our gathering.

The keynote was delivered by Marietta Radomska, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Linköping University and director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab. Drawing from environmental humanities, queer death studies, and artistic research, Radomska spoke about ecological grief and spaces of forgetting; those zones where environmental violence becomes normalised, rendered invisible, or temporally dispersed. Concepts such as slow violence, somatechnics, and tentacular tangles of time offered language to think with the river as an ongoing, multi-temporal process shaped by human and more-than-human forces. Through examples of artistic practices, including the work of Roberta Šebjanič and the River Sisters, Radomska highlighted how art and activism can open spaces of care and attentiveness, enabling relations with rivers that resist extractive and instrumental logics. These practices do not aim to represent rivers as objects of study but instead cultivate forms of listening, mourning, and response-ability.

Next, an artist talk was given by artist Maud van den Beuken, whose practice maps the porous spaces between land and water and critically engages with Western epistemologies of environmental control. Van den Beuken presented a broader overview of her work, with a particular focus on Carrying the River, a long-term project that follows dredged river sediment as it is displaced, transported, and recontextualised. Through this work, sediment becomes both a material witness and a political agent, tracing the entanglements of ecology, industry, and extraction.

Her presentation sparked a lively discussion around dredging practices, sediment management, and the often invisible infrastructures that shape river ecologies. Central to the conversation was the question of how creatives and scholars might enter into dialogue with those involved in river management (engineers, policymakers, and extractive industries) without simply reproducing dominant frameworks. How can artistic and research practices challenge managerial perspectives while remaining engaged, critical, and situated within the realities of river governance?

The symposium continued with contributions from two academic researchers participating in the lab. Jelmer Teunissen, a transdisciplinary maker and researcher working at the intersection of urban political ecology, abolition ecology, and bioregionalism, presented their ongoing work on the concept of “polder ableism.” In a passionate talk, Teunissen unpacked how Dutch water management systems, often celebrated as technological achievements, are deeply entangled with norms of productivity, control, and exclusion, producing landscapes and futures that privilege certain bodies, capacities, and ways of living over others.

Julée Al Bayaty de Ridder followed with a presentation drawn from her PhD research on reimagining ways of living with water in the Neerlandophone space. Taking an ecocritical, decolonial, and neo-materialist approach, she proposed counter-narratives to the long-standing Dutch myth of a “battle against the water.” By thinking with water as both material reality and metaphor, her work opens up to more amphibious modes of living, attentive to the colonial histories embedded in contemporary water practices.

The day concluded with a rich group conversation that wove together these perspectives. Participants reflected on the role of colonialism in river management, particularly the outsourcing of environmental risk and control as a tool of oppression. Dutch approaches such as Room for the River were critically examined, already in relation to Meinerswijk, the floodplain area in Arnhem that the lab would visit the following day. The discussion underscored that meeting a river is always entangled with histories of power, extraction, and resistance. As an opening moment, the symposium laid the conceptual and ethical foundation for the days of embodied, material, and situated encounters with the river that followed.