The session begins with Waterloper Tarot Collective by Rhoda Davids Abel, a collaborative tarot card making practice where water becomes source, medium, and guide. Through a meditative storytelling introduction, participants enter an atmosphere shaped by soundscapes, field notes, and water recordings from Tanzania and South Africa, interwoven with fragmented poetry. Personal and collective narratives of water, memory, and ritual are gently evoked.

Drawing on the notion of Waterloper, the act of walking with water, lifting one’s hem while moving through it, participants are invited into stillness, observation, and subtle embodied attention through gentle gestures. Water is approached as witness, as passage, and as relation.

From this shared ground, the workshop transitions into a collective poetry session guided by Ishita Chakraborty. Participants reflect on rivers that hold meaning for them, whether real, remembered, or imagined, and translate these into words, fragments, and sounds using typewriters and other materials. Working across languages, texts are written, rewritten, and transformed into a shared flow of voices.

The process unfolds collaboratively, weaving individual contributions into a living glossary of river languages shaped by personal stories, cultural references, and imagination.