STILL HERE – an alliance of care for the SZenne River

Since 2023, Natural Contract Lab (NCL) has been walking-with* the SZenne river and its kin communities including people, dragonflies, willows, sparrows, rain, knotweed, nettles…  seen and unseen. From its source, under a willow tree in Naast to its confluence, where the river bifurcates with other bodies of water.

STILL HERE is an ephemeral process that is trying to recalibrate the sensuous affection for the SZenne and its kin, to acknowledge water ecosystems and its meaningful relationships. STILL HERE attends to the river, and becomes a shared experience to unlearn current systems of governance and management, to let the river teach us the emergent ripples of care. Giving time to grief and acknowledging our hydro losses, through walking-with, sensing and listening to the river, reciprocating and learning from the beings how they care for eachother. Asking how we can prepare our porous bodies to learn other ways of care and governance from the river as our teacher.

In 2025, STILL HERE alliance is seeking to become the storytellers and stewards of the Szenne river. Yet, can our water memories, stories, songs, rituals become a legitimate agreement of stewardship? As an artistic experiment, STILL HERE is fabulating a preamble that is both a legal text, a story-telling and a repertoire of scores composed by water memories, songs, oral river histories and ephemeral sculptures.

The relation with the river has been evolving since 2023 with an ongoing Protocol of Reciprocal Care for water bodies with the following phases. During the process we become storytellers, the river vessels to remember and acknowledge that the River SZenne is still here.

Phase 1: Walking-with  “Ecologies of grief, solidarity and care”

Can grief help us to live more gently and caring in relation to our rivers? As our sensing body starts to align with the deep time of the river, we hold a grief circle to remember and acknowledge the landscapes we have lost. Here, we start moving the flow of solidarity and empathy, to process the entanglement of loss collectively with the SZenne river and emerge in gratitude for the harms inflicted in the SZenne river.

Phase 2: Walking-with  “River Kinships, wondering and fabulating forms of care”

How can we learn from river Kinship? As we open the sensing body to the multispecies, we learn the ways of care between its guardians: the trees, nettles, stones, wind, mud, dragonflies… We may not yet embody the concept  “I am the river and the river is me” (Maori Whanganui River), but we can evolve into a conversational circle through storytelling and sensory imaginary to open the thinking for non-linear multispecies entanglements to fabulate stories of kinship and stewardship.

Phase 3: SZENNE AGORA   “An alliance and a council of becoming”

Can a group for the river become an alliance connected by its care for the SZenne river, and how does our love for the river is legitimate for the recognition of the legal rights of SZenne river? In this gathering the stories of the people and beings from the source to its confluence start stirring the waters to reactivate the memory and revive the entanglement of the different parts of the river.

Phase 4: Walking-with  “Remembering and becoming” (2025)

How does the stone, the nettles, the trees, the wind, the mud sense our presence? How do we want to be remembered by the river?  We start braiding our stories collectively with nettles and clay, exploring forms of orality, “histories of listening”, songs and intangible archiving. We become river vessels and weave an agreement of stewardship for the Szenne River.

You can inscribe for phase 4 of the project here.

Phase 5: Confluence of Becoming the stewards of Zenne River (20/09/2025)

In this confluence we row on the river with canoes and thank the river for all the teachings and forms of care we have learned. We make an offering of braid, our stewardship agreement, and weave together our stories with the plants that have been our allies in all the walking-withs from the source to the confluence.