Common Dirt is an ongoing series of events organized by Varia, in which we take a critical look at the cross-connections between biology and technology in Rotterdam.

Diana Pankova will share her work and process on "Solarigraphy - a hand-crafted technology aimed at the star(s)", teaching us how to make your own camera out of a beer can (or any light-tight container)! During this workshop she will share a specific way of capturing sun, that anyone can do, but most don't even think about. You can bring your own empty beer can (or not empty so you can have it for a drink later!)

For the last session in our Fictionality Series we invited artist Toon Fibbe, who proposed to turn our professional selves into (drag)characters, with Anna Delvey serving as our guide and teacher, but not without looking at the (fictional) performativity of funding bodies first...

Every month, The Platform for Extratonality gives the latest musical tendencies a stage at Varia. For October we have invited three groups that will challenge your dreary mindset. With the help of sunny improvisations, they are bound to disperse the autumn clouds for a while!

This workshop is a point of entry into a broader discussion looking towards new tech that is making it ever more simple and accessible to 'capture nature in a single click'. During the workshop we will explore digital conservation techniques and their impact, while considering how digital conservation techniques might shape the future landscape.

Extratonal Infrastructure is back for a second batch of irregular musical performances in the heart of the south of Rotterdam. Join us on the 4th of September for a dizzying array of notes, pauses and passes as we once again welcome the latest extratonal tendencies to varia.

Join us for a celebration moment of our extratonal resident Ål Nik’ end of art residency! She will share her sonic experiments and creations from the last 3 weeks.

This is the second of three installments wherein we collectively would love to further explore 'fictionality' in its various critical potentials to tell alternative/yet untold stories. This time we want to focus on NEOLOGISMS

In light of the increasing use of data-driven policing technologies, how can we understand and find ways to address the impact of their deployment? As surveillance technologies become more and more entangled in everyday life, what are our possibilities of response? Who or what are the key players in these considerations? Sanne Stevens and Jair Schalkwijk will join us to unpack these questions.

Common Dirt is an ongoing series of events organized by Varia, in which we take a critical look at the cross-connections between biology and technology in Rotterdam. During this summer excursion we will investigate the workings behind identification apps, such as ObsIdentify and Pl@ntNet. We will start in the garden of het O'tje, next to Attent.

The ^ collective will be visiting Varia at the end of June. This visit is a follow-up from last November, when a few Varia members visited ^ in Ireland to take part in the Irish Design Week, and get to know the collective and their local network. During their time in Rotterdam, we aim to re-explore our local landscape, infrastructure and networks informed by our different migration backgrounds, focusing on our solidarity network, paths of access to local resources and the support structures that sustain the cultural sector in Rotterdam. On Tuesday the 25th, we will have a day of collective reflection and a chance to get to know ^, where everyone is invited to discuss and have a drink.

The 13th edition of Extratonal Infrastructure will focus on the concept of exaltation. In our understanding music can be a means to elevate spirits to a higher level. In May, the platform for extratonality invites a number of artists to varia who have dedicated themself to this cause through dynamic rhythms, decontextualized juxtapositions, spontaious improvisation and unified chaos.

Noiserr is an expanded Reading and Listening and Doing group focused on sound, and specifically, noise and noise philosophy. We read, act, think, sniff noise and the noise related and then we Talk or Do something about it in a Group setting.

This worksession intends to be a moment of collective learning, to make tangible invisible colonial mechanisms of hierarchy and oppression that are prevalent in everyday communication technologies, yet often difficult to comprehend.

Doodle Dabble is a workshop for children to dip their toes in the pond of Varia. It is an invitation to observe and jump in different puddles of the space. Let's move our bodies, play games, and doodle around! As part of Varia's Accessibility Seed research thread, Varia is opening its space with an intention to learn from children how they intuitively find their ways to access spaces and reside in multi-language situations with playful manner. Happening every last Saturday of the month, it is one of the three repeating workshop series (25th May, 29th June, 27th July) with a guest artist Chaeyoung Kim.