Date: Friday 24th July 2026
Time: 18:00–20:30
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
Access: free

The third session of Self-medicated Practices looks at self-diagnosis. Not the wellness industry one, where you track your biometrics out of curiousity and with the aim of extending the health of your already fit body. The kind that you resort to because you had nine minutes with the doctor, they dismissed your symptoms and told you it is probably just stress.

Self-diagnosis happens in the gap between what we hope healthcare is and what we actually receive. Women and non-cis bodies get gaslighted, chronic conditions get ignored, symptoms that do not fit the books get labeled as phychosomatic. So you learn to prepare, to research, to walk in so well-informed that you do not walk out with nothing.

We turn to forums, to each other, to LLMs at 01 AM. LLMs listen loger than most GPs. But they also hoover up our desperation as training data, while using obscene amounts of energy and water, contributing to a multifold of crises. Big tech monetizes the failures of institutional care.

For this session we do not have a guest. We want to hold an open, messy, hybrid mutual support session. We want to hear from people navingating illness, (invisible) disabilities, chronic conditions, the bureaucratic violence of healthcare.

What does community care look like when medical professionals are unable to hold us? How do forums become archives of embodied knowledge? When did online spaces become a sort of healing circle? How to use black-box technologies critically? What are we trading away and what alternatives can we build together? How do we access knowledge and share it without feeding surveillance capitalism?

Bring your questions, tools, strategies, your rage.
You can also join us online here: https://meet.waag.org/varia

This is a masked event, masks will be available at the door.

The session is organised by Yoana Buzova and Alice Strete. This event falls within Varia’s Homebrewing Seed research thread and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.