Date: Thursday 10 July
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Location: Varia, Gouwstraat 3

In this presentation, Nabila Ernada will share research developed during her time at the Design Academy Eindhoven, exploring postcolonial surveillance, feminist resistance, and the architectures of visibility in Indonesia, from the weaponised image of Gerwani (a feminist group violently disbanded in the 1960s) to contemporary forms of algorithmic control.

Through film, sound, and writing, Nabila traces how media infrastructures, from state television to satellites to social platforms, have been used to monitor, shame, and erase women’s choices. She examines how propaganda has morphed into digital policing, and how resistance moves not through confrontation but through disappearance, glitch, and refusal. In these works, subversion is not loud. It is encrypted, scattered, and misaligned, a feminist strategy of survival beyond visibility.

Nabila Ernada is a design researcher and media artist based in Rotterdam. Her work traces the in-between zones of surveillance and resistance, examining how media infrastructures govern visibility, legality, and the body — especially in Indonesia. She works across text, film, and installation, often weaving feminist subversion into sonic, archival, and bureaucratic systems. She recently completed her MA in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, where she was awarded Best Thesis for Out of Sight: On Subverting Gendered Surveillance.

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