Het Zuid Manifest: Carola Loves Carlos
The art festival of Charlois

Welcome to Het Zuid Manifest: Carola Loves Carlos!
The festival spans across 17 locations throughout Charlois. Use this digital map to find your way around. You are free to explore at your own pace and create your own route.

Find the visitor guide with the full program here.
You can also pick up a printed version at each location.

Locations
1. Rib, Katendrechtse Lagedijk 490B
2. Nefis Kebab, Wolphaertsbocht 93
3. Kapsalon Charlois, Wolphaertsbocht 62B
4. Cyro Bloemsierkunst, Wolphaertsbocht 81
5. Shofukan, Charloisse Kerksingel 32
6. Oude Kerk Charlois, Charloisse Kerksingel 35
7. Stichting Historisch Charlois, Kaatsbaan 6
8. Stone Shop (SLstone Natuursteen B.V.), Plompertstraat 14
9. Café The Buccaneer, Doklaan 43
10. Attractiepark Rivoli Rotterdam, Doklaan 40
11. Garagegebouw Maastunnel Zuidzijde, Doklaan 145
12. De Barones Sexshop, Boergoensestraat 66B
13. Home Gallery Katendrechtse Lagedijk 457D
14. Subway Pool Café, Wolphaertsbocht 196
15. Planet Cake, Dorpsweg 41A
16. De Nieuwe Nachtegaal, Mezenhof 27
17. Art Rotterdam, Ahoyweg 10

Opening Party
The festival celebrates on Friday 27 March with an opening party at Subway Pool Café, starting at 21:30 and continuing until late. The evening features DJ sets by Barnt, Hendrik Meyer and Jens-Uwe Beyer.

Performance The Swimmers — Peach Rotterdam
On Friday 27 March, from 16:00 to 18:00, at Garagegebouw Maastunnel Zuidzijde, Doklaan 145, The Swimmers takes place — a programme of readings and performances initiated by Peach, an artist-run space from Rotterdam.

Performance PSYCHOMAGIE – Paul Goede
On Sunday 29 March at 15:00, PSYCHOMAGIE, a seance by Paul Goede, takes place at Shofukan, at Charloisse Kerksingel 32. At 16:30, visitors are invited for a get-together with drinks, doubling as a farewell to Shofukan and its community after two decades in Charlois.

Rib presents the second edition of Het Zuid Manifest: Carola Loves Carlos, an art festival taking place across Charlois, a district in Rotterdam, from 26 to 29 March 2026. The festival was conceived and is curated by Maziar Afrassiabi, founder and director of Rib.

Het Zuid Manifest is an annual, free contemporary art festival that unfolds across everyday spaces in Rotterdam South. Working with residents, local entrepreneurs, international galleries and artists, the festival situates contemporary art within the social and architectural specificities of Charlois.

Artworks are placed in shops, empty storefronts, a theme park, and other everyday locations, many of which have never previously been used to present contemporary art. The exhibition unfolds as a dramaturgy, exploring the encounters between artwork and setting.

Charlois is positioned as both an exhibition of site and a site of exhibition. Charlois is a neighbourhood in Rotterdam South with distinct socio-economic challenges, visible and palpable the moment you enter the area. The experience of encountering art in these settings inevitably differs for those who call Charlois home and those arriving from outside, each bringing a distinct gaze, held together in productive tension.

For its second edition, Carola Loves Carlos expands the festival’s scale and international scope. More than twenty galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions across Europe and beyond have collaborated on the selection of participating artists, shaped through dialogue and shared affinities. At the same time, new venues have been added throughout the neighbourhood, further embedding the festival within its local context.

Het Zuid Manifest is also present at Art Rotterdam in Ahoy with a group presentation of small works by artists participating in the festival, functioning as an invitation to the many fair visitors to step outside and into the neighbourhood.

Participating galleries and institutions
Agence de Voyages (Paris), De Ateliers (Amsterdam), Esther Schipper (Berlin), Etablissement d'en Face (Brussels), Gauli Zitter (Brussels), Galerie Guido W. Baudach (Berlin), JUBG (Cologne), KIN (Brussels), Kirchgasse Gallery (Steckborn), Kunsthalle Lingen (Lingen), Galerie Mieke van Schaijk (Den Bosch), MMXX (Milan), MORPHO (Antwerp), O Gallery (Tehran), Galerie Oskar Weiss (Zürich), Peach (Rotterdam), Shahin Zarinbal (Berlin), Stokker Jaeger (Amsterdam), Unseen X HKU Keep an Eye Photography Stipend (Utrecht), Van Abbehuis (Eindhoven).

Participating artists
Ghislain Amar, Lucy Azatyan, Vicente Baeza, Raymond W. Barion, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Darly Benneker, Dagmar Bosma, Tina Braegger, Jakob Brugge, Teddy Coste, Julia Dubsky, Iyanla Etnel, Peter Fengler & Jens-Uwe Beyer, Olivier Foulon, Rick Geene, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi, Paul Goede, Adèle Grégoire, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Tracy Hanna, Thomas Helbig, Jack Jaeger, Erwin Kneihsl, Cosima zu Knyphausen, Wjm Kok, Vesta Kroese, Gabriel Kuri, Daniel Laufer, Sam Marshall Lockyer, Bernd Lohaus & Nora Schultz, Mathieu Meijers, Sinaida Michalskaja, Carolina Mills, Neda Mirhosseini, Kenichi Ogawa, Martha Olech, Nie Pastille, Zahra Pourghomi, Chloé Quenum, Joke Robaard, Kurt Ryslavy, Philipp Schwalb, Richard Sides, Ken Stoové, Adriënne Verburg, Noor van der Wal, David Weiss, Hussel Zhu, Luigi Zuccheri.

Maziar Afrassiabi, founder and curator of Het Zuid Manifest:
“I want to move away from the idea that art must continually produce new objects, brands and claims. Instead, we seek to facilitate a renewed affective experience of encounter, one that speaks for itself. When existing artworks meet a specific setting, something surfaces that was already present in both the work and the location, yet remained unspoken.”

Who is Carola and who is Carlos?
The first edition carried the title I Love Carlos. It borrowed its name from a local poster declaring "I Love Charlois," a phrase that sounded at once like civic pride and a hesitant confession. Love for a neighbourhood is rarely simple. On some of these posters, anonymous hands intervened. The "h" and the "i" were scratched away, leaving behind a new declaration: I Love Carlos. A small act of erasure transformed a slogan into something more intimate, more unstable. This altered phrase lingered in the streets as a quiet counter-myth, offsetting the official voices and monumental gestures that shape the district, the very structures to which Het Zuid Manifest implicitly refers, while positioning itself as something other.

The title of the second edition, Carola Loves Carlos, extends this moment of disruption into a relational story. No longer a solitary declaration, love becomes reciprocal, an exchange between names, places, and those who inhabit them. The name Carola was chosen because it paired well with Carlos. That it also happens to be the first name of Rotterdam's mayor was not intentional, but perhaps not an unhappy coincidence either. The real Carola behind the title is a bartender at Café The Buccaneer on the Doklaan, a fixture of the neighbourhood where the festival takes place.