Year of participation

2025

Where the River Sings (working title) brings together stories, science, ecology, and non-human voices. It started with X.B. Saintine’s Mythologie du Rhin (1862), where rivers speak, trees judge, and people turn into animals or ghosts. These old myths opened up a way of thinking about nature that feels urgent now—one where humans aren’t at the center.Together with Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and her Climate Imaginaries research group, we’re building a solar-powered, local, slow-AI story generator. It connects Rhine myths with today’s ecological data and more-than-human perspectives. The stories it creates will be gathered in a publication, alongside contributions from writers like Nat Muller and others working in climate fiction, science, and history.During our time at Odapark, on the edge of the Meuse-Rhine region, we’re developing a character to give this story machine a voice: a contemporary troubadour. This figure drifts between human and nature, myth and fact, data and dream. Through this figure, the river speaks—personal, poetic, and constantly changing.The stories that arise will become the base for a film, where the troubadour travels the Rhine, singing its past and future—part storyteller, part spirit of the river.