Imagination Experience
for Shared Lives
RIVERVIEWS
RIVERVIEWS
RiverViews is an immersive installation, and group game for individuals from contested regions and their guests. Centered around a large riverboard that merges waterways from each participant’s place of origin, the game invites players to imagine new shared futures through storytelling, creativity, and AI-enhanced tools.
The RiverViews project is a special collaboration for the Youtopic festival (2025) between Rondine’s World House students, young people from countries currently or recently affected by violent conflict, and Connecting Stations Collective, a multi-cultural Israeli-Palestinian bridging design team.
The Arno Hosts World Rivers.
Between any two communities runs a river. It can flow from one community to the other or run between them. It can mark a line of a contemporary conflict or be a memory of a forgotten war in a time of peace. All rivers are ultimately connected: from those in the homelands of Rondine’s students to the Arno, which flows into the Mediterranean and, beyond it, the world’s oceans.
RiverViews harnesses the power of design, imagination, empathy, and AI to bring Rondine’s students and YouTopic Festival guests together in envisioning everyday life in an era of peace, by imagining future river communities shared by the descendants of today’s adversaries.st.
PARTICIPATING RIVERS AND COMMUNITIES
01 Tavush / Tovuz çay River > Armenia-Azerbaijan
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02 Desna River > Russia-Ukraine
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03 Ibar River > Kosovo-Serbia
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04 Magdalena River > Columbia
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05 Niger River > Mali
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06 Liakhvi River > Georgia - South Ossetia
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01 Tavush / Tovuz çay River > Armenia-Azerbaijan • 02 Desna River > Russia-Ukraine • 03 Ibar River > Kosovo-Serbia • 04 Magdalena River > Columbia • 05 Niger River > Mali • 06 Liakhvi River > Georgia - South Ossetia •
Welcome to
the River Group!
Game Stages
1 — Share Your Identity
Begin by sharing personal stories of identities through images of meaningful objects, spaces, and events from communities along the river, on both sides of the conflict.
2 — Take the River Jump
Leap into a post-conflict future. Choose the most inspiring location along the river to establish a shared community for future generations from once-divided peoples.
3 — Create a Shared Hybrid Object
With the help of the RiverView AI chatbot, blend symbolic objects from both sides into one hybrid that represents a new, shared identity.
4 — Create a Shared Ritual
Use the chatbot again to co-create a communal ritual that centers around your hybrid object—something future river communities can gather around and celebrate.
5 — Join a River Expedition
Share your ritual and hybrid object with other river groups, exchanging visions and fostering connection across communities.
6 — Reflect on your Journey
Come together with all river communities for a final moment of reflection, reflecting on what was imagined, shared, and created.
Imagine Shared Future Rituals
Local conflict has long been resolved, and descendants of once-contested communities live together in river-shared communities.
Over time, these future river communities would create shared cultural practices, including hybrid objects that merge memories and traditions from their founding identities.
RiverViews game participants have imagined these future shared artifacts by joining objects from their original cultures.
Can you speculate?
What is the new shared object's purpose or function?
What is its collective cultural significance?
Want to learn more about the rituals behind the objects?
Lessons from the Arno
We’ve wrapped up our new memories from the Rondine’s RiverViews experience. Let’s imagine the next Connecting Station together.
We continue to develop tailor-made experiences that bridge differences across cultures and geographies. Please contact us for more information or to co-design your next bridging experience.