This study relates how participants in the institutional context of a help desk counter for exchange students at an international university, literally move into interaction, via a set of systematic, publicly accessible and sequentially ordered movements in space. It also renders how participants in and via bodily movements, space use and material object manipulation ‘impersonate the institution’. The study contributes to the research domain of multimodal conversation analytic work on space, mobility and objects in interaction as means for participants’ proceeding meaning-making practices.