Date: Sunday 07 December
Time: 13:00 - 17:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Our repair cafe is a moment to hang out together and learn how to repair our own small electronic equipment, such as computers, audio equipment, printers, etc. You are welcome to join us and fix things …

After a year of reading sessions organised in different spaces throughout Rotterdam; After many hours spent perched behind our laptops, writing, editing, 3d sculpting, designing, debating word-choices in the comment sections of online documents; After a month of tensely awaiting the arrival of our companions, our small but abundant books, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our publication ‘Why Read Together? On Companions, Co-conspirators, and Breathing Words’, published with HumDrumPress.

Geographies of Return brings together two practices that trace the contours of memory, loss and landscape; mapping spaces where the personal meets the historical, outlining the processing of grief.

As part of the Colonial Infrastructures series, this 5th edition will focus on knowledge under duress and its circulation in times of repression. How do we gather to disseminate knowledge that was erased and dispersed? Considering destruction and censorship as acts of colonial force, Resisting Knowledge Erasure will focus on efforts of circulating knowledge via shadow libraries, fugitive archives, infoshop repositories, and other unsanctioned collections.

In this session, the eeefff collective presents the conceptual foundations and recent fieldwork of The School of Algorithmic Solidarity, an itinerant research project established in 2022 to explore emotions and affects shaped by technologies, the possibilities of solidarities in dispersed situations, to critically investigate digital colonialism and value extraction, to elaborate new circumstances through social experimental site, co-acting and collective ways to imagine - to aim towards "infrastructures of imagination".

The Platform For Extratonality invites a number of their favourite artists to curate their own extratonal takeover. First up: NDNMK Solutions, the softest power!

During this session we will discuss the role of code as a tool for communicating methodology to human audiences. Through practices of Literate Programming and explanatory storytelling, we will explore the forms of the “repair manual” and the relationships we form with our functional possessions.

Come and learn how to make cozy pillows with Riccardo Santalucia, using hand crochet techniques - no hooks required - and sharing stories in the process. If you’ll make more than one pillow, consider donating it to Varia for a great cause: listening to music. All the necessary materials will be present in loco.

Following in the footsteps of Riccardo Santalucia's pillowmaking workshop we will test its results during a second offering of cozy drones. A wide range of extratonal drone artists will help you get comfortable and sink into a wonderful world of cushions and padding.

Horta in the Dark is a speculative writing workshop inspired by the Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark. Together with Marjolein van der Loo, we’ll explore how empathy and imagination can bridge encounters with the non-human.

A series of semi-public meetings of cultural workers who are also caregivers

the 🔮 Queer Bar Night in Varia 🔮 is a sibling queer bar of the Vereniging Poortgebouw. this one will be run by some queer Feministas and Varia neighbours who are joining forces for more queer bars in the city to come together 💜

The second public moment of this research thread will focus on (mostly Western) herbalism—the rootstock of what we now call conventional medicine. For this event we invite the Garage School of Medicine.

In this session, we will talk about the human-centered specificities and differences between initiatives doing stuff with technology (gossip, folklore, craft, aesthetics, scenes). In order to discuss them we propose a plastic-fictional etymology of these 5 words as a game to explore and map the multiple natures of "doing things with technology".

On November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Film Lab Palestine are organising over 500 Palestinian film screenings around the world.

Join Doodle Dabble for a brunch and have a bunch of fun making delicious emo-pancakes!

A MICROFESTIVAL of tropico-digital fever dreams, unpacked. A LECTURE by journalist Alan Robles on the underdocumented microhistories of how the Philippines shaped the world's digital culture wars. A MONSTERCLASS on troll hunting—for femmebots only—facilitated by Alan and Clara Balaguer. A GIFT SHOPPE for revolutionary merch and other publishing rarities from JMS Legacy Foundation and comrades. AND MERYENDA brought to you by post-colonial hospitality culture.

Together with Expeditie Ratterdam, we'll be exploring Charlois to observe rats in their familiar surroundings. Maarten Bel and Niek Hilkmann will open the conversation between humans and rats, shedding light on our complex relationship in all its facets and from different perspectives.