Bottari Exchange
Crafting Conversational Starters Together
This project began with a desire to create a space in Zwolle where people across generations could gather around the craft of asking questions. Each month, up to six participants meet to develop conversational card games: small, portable objects that carry prompts for reopening dormant connections or softening hesitations. While each participant builds a game of their own, the work is shaped by the circulation of collective knowledge that forms within the group. As they write questions and experiment with simple mechanics such as dice, turn-taking, or chance, the sessions attend to the quiet ways inquiry exposes not only personal histories but also the layered projections and inherited stories that surface in intergenerational encounters. In Korean, there is a word “응어리” that describes the knots of unspoken emotion that accumulate over time. Through careful listening, shared making, and the slow reciprocity of attention, Bottari Exchange hopes to create conditions where such knots may gently loosen (응어리가 풀리다), allowing participants to sense how understanding can grow not through confrontation, but through witnessing, resonance, and small shifts in relation. The sessions unfold as shared studios of attention, where participants learn not only from the instructional tools provided but also from witnessing one another’s thinking, reasoning, and wondering. These processes will culminate in a collectively authored card set and an accompanying organizational journal that traces the insights, patterns, and emergent forms of the group’s inquiry. The project ultimately hopes to cultivate a practice of asking, slowly, carefully, and together, as a way to reawaken connection, support intergenerational healing, and expand how we come to know one another. Promotion begins at the end of November 2025, and the first session will take place in January 2026.