A recap of the Inner River art residency which took place at the Life Itself Riverside Hub in Bergerac in July 2025, written by Alexia Netcu, one of the members of the hosting team. This post was originally published on Alexia’s Substack, Blowing in the Wind.
Earlier in July, eleven core participants and the three of us on the hosting team packed our bags and headed to the small town of Bergerac in South-West France to dedicate a month to art and creative wayfinding – the long-awaited Inner River residency. Some of us were from the US, a few from different places in Europe, and we even got someone to come from South Africa. The group counted amongst itself some timid explorers, a couple professional painters or writers, a few avid community dwellers, and others still shy in group sharing circles.
The quirky and majestic Life Itself Hub was our home, so we structured our weekdays after the time-tested frame of the Praxis Hub, adding to it a weekly Show & Tell to facilitate our artistic process. Each morning we gathered for meditation, then check-ins in pods, followed by breakfast and an hour of collective care for the garden, house, or food. Meals were cooked in the spirit of mindfulness and sustainability, and eaten together around the large dining table. This collective rhythm enabled us to focus on our own work and collaborations in different chunks of the day, while taking care of physical and emotional needs together.
As the weeks went on, our evening sessions took us on a journey of exploring ancestry, personal histories, our relationship to our art, and to the collective’s uncertain future. Participants, with their wide array of interests and skills, also facilitated many workshops such as nature connection exercises, a rage session, systemic constellations, The Work that Reconnects, and an evening on understanding the Enneagram through a sacred lens.
On weekends we explored the historical and natural surroundings, canoeing between the castles of the Dordogne river, going to different museums and concerts in town, and checking out the market in the smaller village nearby. The ripeness of July was palpable at every corner – the town was bustling with tourists and offering an abundance of juicy plums and bright-pink crepe myrtles.
Our main priority was creating, with people working on things like finishing their first novel, collections of still lives or watercolours, abstract photography series, and even 3D model renditions of local doors and roofs! The funnest moments were when we made things together – from collective paintings to improvised plays, they all made us more intimate with our inner spontaneous flow and with each other.
The month culminated in a final show where we exhibited the projects we’ve been working on throughout the various nooks and crannies of the old house. We were unsure if the fliers we handed around at the market and the big “art Expo” sign hanging from the balcony would be enough to gather a good amount of visitors, but by the end of the evening over 40 people had come by! We were all enthused by being able to create moments of joy and awe for the local community and give back to the place and people that gave to us in the past month.
What could seem from the pictures and above descriptions as purely an idyllic summer camp for adults proved to be a challenging time in different ways for all of us. Between struggles with printing photos or acquiring instruments and supplies, physical sickness, twisted ankles and tending heartbreaks, as co-host Jenny loosely said, “we thought we’d be art-ing but instead we’ve been fully life-ing.”
Besides the art-making, for all of us it was a month of sharing the joys and challenges of our gradual attunement to each other, while being with realities of the world that one cannot escape just because they’re tucked into an old French house for the summer. As a hosting team working together for the first time in this configuration, we learned a lot about the importance of emotional processing when tensions arise, and about the serendipitous emergence that groups carry.
Much like the body of water that flows just steps away from the hub, reflecting ourselves back to us, our collective body served as an ever-changing mirror to our current shape, form, patterns. The month we spent together led to important realisations about our ancestry and artistic process & goals, and left us with a felt sense of the generative tension that often arises in community – that between personal expression & time for creation, and collective rhythms, care, and relationality.
