The first ALMOSTREAL getogether took place 5-6 July 2005 in the Amsterdam cultural and political centre de Balie, and 7 July in the cultural embassy of the Llyod Hotel in Amsterdam. This first semi-public gathering of 16 invited artists and cultural practioners together with the ALMOSTREAL team was organised as a critical opportunity to discuss the conceptual structure of ALMOSTREAL and the artistic practices that the project could consider supporting. The big question that was raised was how ALMOSTREAL could become a catalyst for opening a new space of discourse in-between the interests of artistic practice and the interests of the funder.

"...There seems to be some misunderstanding surrounding the notion of openness — a notion of openness can not function if it is both an openness within the group itself as well as an openness outside the group. Borders serve a function to construct a possible discourse, whether they are nation states or borders that construct a public discourse, or a sphere...and if you leave that sphere open both internally and externally then it is very hard to construct something where arguments can sit onto of each other...This could only be done with something that would be to an external view closed. And to talk about closure there does not mean closure internally…closed is supposedly bad and open is supposedly liberal, but openness also has a devilish side: a false openness that does not change the host, so it goes back to notions of hospitality, hospitality can only be effective if the host is prepared to leave the house and openness in liberal construction is not to that degree. And closedness has a bright side that it defines a structure. It would have been useful to have a specific set of examples to discuss. Because if everything remains on an abstract level everything remains possible everyone has their own interpretations might differ immensely — so it may not be about misunderstanding or not reading the words, it just that it's individual. So unless it is tested in the fire of a real example you never get beyond your own definition of those terms. About the themes: these for me topics as an addition or a sum about what art can be involved in, and you think about those topics confrontations and intimacy coming together and not about separating them, its about those things coming together, for example thinking about a confrontational intimacy. For if you separate confrontation from intimacy then you loose the possibilities or tensions that are set up in the conjunction between the two. The existence all of the at the same time. In the end art is concerned with constructing an ambiguous reality which addresses things like intimate confrontation. That ambiguity is what art has over politics."

— Charles Esche during the Amsterdam Getogether, July 2007.