Dates: from Thursday 4th to Thursday 11th of December;
Death cafe hosted by varia: Friday 5th from 19:00 - 20:30
Exhibition Opening Reading by Birds Wg: Thursday 4th at 19:00
Time: Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 17:00 - 21:00;
Saturday, Sunday: 12:00 - 16:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
Participation: Free, open for all.

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.

In De Lange’s Dad’s Flight Loop Trail, a family photo album becomes a cartographic fiction. Aerial views of the Monument Valley area are reimagined through drawing, painting, and ceramics, moulding grounds where memory drifts between fact and fiction. Through these landscapes, the artist revisits a father’s gaze from above, transforming fragments of the past into tactile, new worlds where remembrance becomes an act of creation. Memory operates as a malleable form—shifting over time and mediating intergenerational bonds. By translating photographic archival material into new spatial and material configurations, De Lange examines her role in preserving, reworking, and re-situating personal histories.

Achadinha’s Deixem Passar (it favors the house) unfolds as a filmic meditation on diasporic masculinities, economic pressure, and intergenerational obligation. Moving from the sugarcane fields of Madeira to the shopfronts of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the work traces inherited mythologies and the invisible architectures of power that shape familial narratives. It is a site where grief becomes entangled within systemic forces. Achadinha employs montage and the video essay as both method and language, articulating the interwoven nature of familial burden and aspirational mythologies.

Together, these works seek to understand emotional and geographical sites of fatherhood and memory, revealing how personal histories are carried and re-configured across time and terrain.

During the Death cafe inspired by https://deathcafe.com/ we will drink eat, eat cookies and discuss death.

Gabriella Achadinha (b. 1990, Bloemfontein, South Africa) draws on her background in film to merge practices that weave together video, photography, and sound. Her work seeks to engage the digital realm as a space marked by both radical disconnection and intensified connectivity, considering the otherworldly and the past as liminal strategies—a tool for political inquiry. Her work oscillates between introspection and socio-political critique, often navigating embodied experience through speculative and poetic frameworks.

Karlijn de Lange is a visual artist and art educator based in Rotterdam. Her practice explores how memory interacts with a bird’s-eye view of the landscapes where those memories were formed. Working across drawing, oil painting, and ceramics, she revisits personal geographies.