Open from 1987-1999, Amsterdam’s RoXY nightclub emerged at the genesis of rave culture, enjoying success during a crucial turning point in the socio-economic organisation of the inner city.

Amsterdam’s legendary RoXY nightclub closed down on 21 June 1999 in the most spectacular style. Beginning with the funeral of the club’s founder Peter Giele (who had died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 55) the day had already been a bit of a fiasco, with Giele’s corpse falling out of the coffin as it was being lowered into the grave. But it got worse at the wake, when some indoor fireworks started a fire that managed to burn the whole place down.

Significance to Amsterdam’s alternative scene

It was a sad end, and not one that Giele would have wanted. While it may have secured the club’s legendary status, the space was host to many important artworks and it represented the crowning achievement of a man whose significance to Amsterdam’s alternative cultural scene was immeasurable.

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Right time, right place

Operating for just over a decade, the club’s opening in 1987 came at an incredibly opportune moment. The late 80s was when house music really started to take hold in Western Europe, coming here in a process which started in the wake of disco, emerging from queer, black and Latino communities in Chicago, Detroit and New York in the early 80s and arriving in Europe by way of Ibiza and the legendary parties of DJ Alfredo at Amnesia.

The club that really captured the mood

In 1988, there was also the beginning of the so-called “Second Summer of Love” with a massive wave of free parties and illegal raves. Just as the previous summer of love in the late 60s was fuelled by LSD, so its successor was similarly fuelled by the widespread use of another new drug: MDMA, a substance which really stimulated euphoric, empathetic and loved-up experiences.
Around this time, several clubs cropped up that began to cater to the increasing numbers of people eager for an intense cocktail combining the drug; this new, often very soulful dance music; and also this incredibly vibrant and exuberant aesthetic, shaped by those black and queer communities who had first introduced the sounds in the early 80s. The club that really captured this mood in Amsterdam was the RoXY.

Converting the old Roxy porn cinema into a club

Situated near to the city’s famous flower market, the RoXY was founded as a collaboration between Giele, DJ Eddy de Clerque and magazine editor Arjen Schrama. Giele, however, was the driving force behind the project: he was the person who first saw the potential of converting the old Roxy porn cinema into a club and it was him who shaped the RoXY into what he called a “total art” experience, giving the club the backronym “Radical Outlet for the Xenomaniac in You”.

Filled with work from the local art scene

The toilets and the corridors were filled with work from the local art scene, there was a spectacular, constantly changing visual display produced by artist Gerald van der Kaap, and all this was underpinned by the music, with heavy emphasis on new genres, such as acid house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, breakbeat. Giele’s vision really resonated with the traditional modernist idea of “art for the masses”, providing a space where ordinary people could encounter experimental art, if they wanted to, but could just as easily get off their heads and dance all night.

An entertainment space

Prior to opening the RoXY, Giele was involved in setting up the squatted art gallery Aorta, located along the Warmoesstraat near the Oude Kerk and a lot of the ideas expressed in the RoXY were first developed there: providing an entertainment space alongside art, freedom for artists exhibiting, an emphasis on energy and a general decommodified, DIY aesthetic that took its inspiration from the punk movement that emerged a decade before.

A pretty exceptional moment in urban history

Both spaces would not have been possible without the wider socio-economic conditions prevailing in the city at the time. In Amsterdam, as with many of the other cities where rave really took hold in a big way, you have a very active movement seeking to challenge the fundamental organisation of working and living. This was helped by the still quite generous state benefits for artists and the unemployed. It was also helped by the fact that deindustrialisation and suburbanisation had left many cities with a large amount of underused space.
In other words, these cities gave a lot of people a lot of free space and a lot of free time. It was a pretty exceptional moment in urban history. Looking at the organisation of cities now, its difficult to see a time when a club like the RoXY could come back again.

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And today?

The building that housed the RoXY from 1987-1999 is located at Singel 465-467 in Amsterdam. Now there is a clothing store at the address. So what remains of the RoXY are the many stories, myths and also the DJs and Djanes who played and grew up there. One of them is Djane Isis whose career began in RoXY. In an interview with Vice – an online magazine – she talks about her experiences:

Isis: “The RoXY was a great place. There has never been anything like it since. It’s just incredible how much work was put into creating a unique atmosphere back then. Every week you could hear the best DJs there, accompanied by great performances and artwork. The club was literally multi-disciplinary. It was avant la lettre-also ahead of its time.”

“Move freely as a woman”

Isis: “Moreover, it was the only place in Amsterdam where you could walk around as a woman and not be harrassed. There was a strict door policy, but inside was a uniquely safe and free environment, in which anyone could express themselves freely – gays, fashionistas, alternatives. Even completely naked people weren’t frowned upon.”

In Wikipedia it says: “The RoXY also enjoyed fame for its, very random, door policy. Those who were welcomed with an open door could just as easily be rejected the next time. Only a coveted membership guaranteed access. A positive consequence of the door policy was that there was usually a pleasant atmosphere inside.”

Theatrical ending

Isis: “By the time RoXY burned down in 1999, it had lost some of its magic. The fire was a big drama in Dutch house history, but in my opinion, it was the theatrical ending its founder Peter Gielen (RIP) would have wished for.”

Copyright of the text/interview with Isis belongs to Vice. Click here for the original interview. And here the version in German.

Many people’s first encounter with the Covid-19 outbreak was in the supermarket, but empty shelves expose supply chain problems that run much deeper than the current crisis.

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Like most people, my first direct encounter with the Covid-19 crisis was in a supermarket. One weekday in the first half of March, I went to pick up a few things at my local Lidl in Osdorp, Amsterdam. Nothing out of the ordinary, but as it happened, we were low on toilet roll. When I went to get some, I saw several people picking up the 24 pack they had on offer. One person was carrying two of these jumbo packs. I’m embarrassed to say that the sight of literally hundreds of toilet rolls leaving the store in a matter of minutes, coupled with the stories of panic-buying I’d seen and heard about in the UK and the US, moved me to pick up a pack myself.

A few days later, on Friday 12th March, the first lockdown measures were introduced by the Dutch government. Shelves were practically empty in many supermarkets by the following morning. Since then, most stocks have been replenished (flour being one of the notable exceptions, apparently even the suppliers of the supermarkets ran out of it), but subsequent trips have remained charged with a new significance that’s somewhat hard to deal with.

Conspicuous abundance

I’m no stranger to fraught supermarket encounters. To be honest, I’ve always found the supermarket a pretty anxiety-inducing space. Maybe it’s the lack of light, or the fact that too much choice stresses me out. I’ve never felt comfortable around such conspicuous abundance. But the feeling that everyone else around me is also equally on edge doesn’t help matters.

For most people in the West, there’s clearly something quite disturbing about empty shelves. Until recently, most of us had come to see them as a thing of the past, or perhaps associated the image with shops in the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries of the past and present. Which is to say, we think of the phenomenon as a product of systems beset by scarcity. It’s this association that has undoubtedly fuelled a number of laughable attempts to displace our own system’s recent failings, by casting it as a momentary taste of what life would be like under a socialist system. But the sudden surge in demand caused by the Covid-19 outbreak is not a momentary taste of life under socialism. Nor is it a sign of the greed of what is likely only a small number of hoarders. Rather, it’s an emphatic expression of the fragility of our entire economic model.

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The problem with distribution

In an article on this subject for Novara Media, Craig Gent quotes a recent statement made by the CEO of British supermarket chain Waitrose made on BBC Newsnight. “The supply of goods, the manufacture of food, is in good shape. There isn’t a problem there; there is enough food. […] The challenge that the supermarkets are facing at the moment is getting that food into their distribution centres and then having enough space, and having enough lorries and drivers to get it to the shops, and then being able to keep it on the shelves.”

This is a pretty accurate explanation of the essential requirements for our system’s “just-in-time” supply chains to function properly. It’s not about the availability of food, but its distribution. Just-in-time supply chains are principally concerned with maximising efficiency (and profit) by minimising waste: of space (e.g. goods sitting in costly storage facilities); and time (e.g. workers spending too long delivering or processing those goods, or demanding too high a price for their labour). This goal, to trim all the excess fat from a supply chain, to make it as “lean” as possible, works very well when everything else in the system is ticking along as normal. But it leaves very little room for sudden unexpected shifts in consumption patterns: like when a large section of the population are suddenly compelled to stay home and stock up on supplies while the (normally critically undervalued but now all of a sudden “essential”) workers tasked with keeping the supply chains moving are reluctant to come out to work for fear of infection.

Historical Aberration

Another source of fragility is the thin spread of these supply across the entire globe. With containerisation and logistics innovations having dramatically reduced the costs associated with transporting goods from one part of the world to another, the materials and work contained within a single product can come from dozens of countries in different parts of the world before it reaches the consumer. Again, this is all well and good when the global economy is functioning as normal, but it seems critically short-sighted now that certain countries have been forced to reduce their economic activity drastically.

We’re only a few weeks into the current crisis, so we’ve probably only just begun to see serious changes in the availability of certain consumer goods (namely cleaning and medical supplies). But even this quick recap already makes me think that the supermarket as we know it is an historical aberration, fuelled by an astonishingly short-sighted and precarious global economic arrangement.

The Second Bicycle Architecture Biennale launched in Amsterdam this June, featuring an array of cutting-edge bicycle infrastructural projects from around the world. But how useful are they for citizens not blessed with a bike friendly city?

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Last June saw the opening of the Second Bicycle Biennale in Amsterdam, a showcase of various innovative bicycle infrastructural projects from Europe and around the world. Initiated by the BYCS foundation, and curated by NEXT Architecture, this edition was introduced at Amsterdam’s WeMakeThe.City festival, before going on tour across Europe, making stops at several major exhibitions and events, including Velo-City in Ireland, Arena Oslo, as well as events in Rome and Gent.

The biennale featured fifteen projects in total, selected for their success in extending beyond functional design solutions and tackling wider urban problems. While this allows for quite a wide berth, several themes emerge from the entries. To start with, many of the projects are defined by their relationship to pre-existing car and rail infrastructure. For instance, one involves the creative repurposing of an old highway in Auckland and another involves renovation of an old railway in Queens, New York, while a project in Barcelona has successfully overcome the impediment created by a particularly tricky section of the city’s motorway network.

Seeking synergy

In a similar vein, several projects have clearly been selected for their success in binding together previously disparate parts of the city. This goes for the Auckland and Queens projects, as well as a striking bridge in the small Dutch town of Purmerend, and another bridge in Cologne, Germany which has helped to turn its surrounding area into a new city centre.

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Meanwhile, there’s a very obvious focus on projects that seek to synergise with the key nodes of a city’s wider infrastructure, including a skyway that maps onto a bus rapid transit line in the Chinese city of Xiamen, a bike path that follows Berlin’s elevated U1 metro line, as well as projects in Copenhagen, Utrecht and The Hague which all adeptly insert themselves into the rapid passenger flows of these cities’ respective central train stations.

Sensitive, Stealthy, Smooth

If there were a golden thread observable from all these themes, it probably comes from the seeming assumption that the desired bicycle-centred city of the future is best achieved by way of solutions that are sensitive, stealthy and smoothly plugged into the pre-existing urban fabric. This is definitely an uncontroversial and sensible approach, and by no means the wrong one, but it would be great if a future edition also focused on some more bottom-up interventions. Coming as they do from Amsterdam, it cannot have escaped the founders of the Biennale that their own city’s incredibly bike-friendly atmosphere comes thanks to decades of grassroots activism from previous generations, rather than being delivered through top-down urban planning.

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More grassroots, wider geography

Covering some more grassroots projects ought to also address another issue with the Biennale, that most of its successful entries are located in North and Western Europe, with four projects from The Netherlands, three from Germany, two from Belgium and one from Denmark.

Given these places are at the forefront of the move to a more bicycle-oriented urban environment, this narrow geography is to be expected. But the many cities where conditions aren’t suited to cutting edge infrastructure surely could do with some more practicable inspiration from other places that are similarly hamstrung.

To be fair to the Biennale, it’s beyond their stated scope to intervene in the various complex political situations that prevent bicycle infrastructure from being realised. But avoiding this aspect will necessarily limit its capacity for meaningful change.

Clubbing used to be something governments tried to shut down. But even nowadays, the nightlife needs someone ensuring that inhabitants stay happy and revellers calm: a night mayor like Shamiro van der Geld. But the challenges of the acceptance of nightlife are big – hopefully not too big for one single man. Our author Charlie Clemoes accompanied Shamiro during the Amsterdam Dance Event and found out more about his tasks. 

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All images by: Amie Galbraith – Styleandstill

Find the entire article on Shamiro van der Geld in topos 105.