‘Softcore’ (2025) is a femme-made space of texture and touch, where sculpted sound stations meet cuddle-ready loveseats and retro consoles hum with play. Somewhere between a lounge, a slow party, and a shared living room, the installation invites closeness, drift, and gentle experimentation. Built from wood, foam, fiberglass, and circuitry, it reimagines nightlife as soft infrastructure. It’s something that holds you, listens back, and pulses with strange pleasure. Both an artwork and a living platform, Softcore is grounded in rest, sound, and collective joy.

For the past six years, Nuno has been sharing peanuts during social engagements: in cafés, at parties, exhibition openings etc. During these events, the artist has shared moments, experiences and thoughts with others. In those instances, the shells of the shared peanuts serve as a metaphor for the body that carries what was shared in those encounters. They encapsulate time and space, carrying information like DNA. By then collecting the shells of the shared peanuts, Nuno has created sculptural landscapes like “Tree of Life”, (2019-ongoing), that ask critical questions about our relationship with nature and the environment.

‘Biosonic Garden’ (2025) is a multisensory biodata sonification/visualisation project that hinges on an overarching speculative concept, which Deniz calls “human-nature-computer interaction (HCNI)”, adding "nature" to the HCI (human-computer interaction) field. Deniz treats both technology and natural elements, such as plants and fungi, as part of our biome while leveraging technology as a bridge between both worlds. This project asks, “What if we could use nature as an alternative organic interface?” Consequently, Deniz’s installation emanates the sounds of electrical pulses of plants and turns them into an interactive audio/visual experience which is activated and reactive to human touch.

Moving across media and disciplines, the collective afloat, initiated by Anna Bierler and María Mazzanti, explores how publishing can take on experimental, performative, and embodied forms. Their work engages with themes of ecological collapse, endings, survival and world making. In ‘Crave’ (2025), publishing becomes edible: a cake is prepared, served, and shared as a temporary publication and site of gathering. The cake functions as a material reflection on rites of passage, mourning, celebration, transition, where the act of eating becomes a ritual for marking an ending. Here, afloat considers how endings can be felt socially and sensually as thresholds.
On August 1st, Afloat is hosting a cake ritual — come by for free and RSVP your spot via the ticket link.

‘Caught Sounds’ (2025) by Anita Burato is an interactive textile installation which features a handwoven conductive fabric. Touching the textile triggers field recordings from Rotterdam, turning the installation into a collaborative instrument that plays the city. Inside the space, visitors are invited to play and tune into the city’s soundscape. The installation invites moments of pause, collaboration and deep listening, revealing the richness hidden in the everyday and the overlooked.

‘knowledge is a problem’ (2024-ongoing) is an interdisciplinary installation and activation project rooted in research on moxibustion, an ancestral medical practice passed down through matrilineal knowledge in the artist’s family and environment. Drawing from colonial histories and VOC archives, it explores how indigenous medical systems were appropriated and reframed within Western anatomical discourse. The installation is activated through open rehearsals during the exhibition period. Through somatic language and embodied critique, the work deconstructs dominant narratives of medicine and knowledge, challenging intellectual hierarchies and reversing historical power structures through the presence of a non-white, non-male performing body.

‘Re:Subjected’ (2025) is the outcome of an open-ended exploration into the future of materials. Developed within Platform Project 4, the work emerged from a collaborative process between students and artist Laura Elidedt Rodriguez. What began as a series of lab-like explorations into material science and speculative fabrics grew into a conceptual shift: what if materials were not passive or lifeless, but active participants in our world?

'Re:Subjected' questions the systems that have taught us to dominate and consume, and instead imagines materials as companions with agency and presence. It asks what kind of futures become possible when we choose to listen rather than extract.