Date: Saturday, 17 January 2026
Time: 15:00-17:30 CET
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

In the third installment of ‘B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality’, we turn our attention to the fictive in relation to poetry. Our guest Çağlar Köseoğlu will guide this session through the work of Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan. A central point of reference will be The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan’s poetic response to war and imperial violence, which continues to resonate amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Taking cues from The Arab Apocalypse and its interplay of fact and fiction, we will approach the fictive as a form of excess - something that amplifies and distorts reality. In Adnan’s poems, the fictive can be read as a strategy for grappling with extreme violence and historical rupture, offering ways to navigate the affective and psychic challenges of witnessing the unthinkable.

Through collective reading and engaging in small exercises, we will reflect on how poetry might function as a means of reckoning with world-ending realities. One guiding hypothesis for the workshop is that the apocalypse is not a singular event, but a structure - ongoing and unevenly distributed.

Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet based in Rotterdam. His poems have appeared in nY, Samplekanon, De Internet Gids, Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen, Cabaret Wittgenstein, Social Text, and are forthcoming in deleuzine. His chapbook 34 (Stanza, 2015) is both an anti-history of Turkey and an abstract elegy for a group of Kurdish border traders. His poetry collection Nasleep [Aftermath] (het balanseer, 2020) takes the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a point of departure and explores the remnants of that historical moment, oscillating between polyphonic, critical noise, and post-revolutionary affects. In 2025, he was the poet in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Currently, he is working on his next collection onze liefde is terroristisch [our love is terroristic], for which he received a grant from the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Köseoğlu teaches in the Humanities department at Erasmus University College, at MEiA at the Piet Zwart Institute, and at Critical Studies at the Sandberg Institute.

This event falls within Varia’s Homebrewing Seed research thread, and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.