Community campaign: meet the family
Motel Mozaïque is built on a foundation of talented and creative people, forming a warm and supportive, ever-growing community that we have been working with for years. This year, we decided to take a bold step and show the MOMO Family! We decided to start a community campaign with 10 of our ambassadors as models, and we asked them about that true MOMO feeling. The feeling that is carried throughout our organisation.
MOMO Makes You Wonder
For this campaign we created a MOMO Wonderroom: a wooden box that represents the wondrous world of MOMO. Stepping into the MOMO wonderbox means stepping into the unknown: discovering a new world of music, moments and.. people! That’s why we have called our campaign: MOMO Makes You Wonder. Referring to the many, often emotional, memories people have of their MOMO Festival experience. Wonder also stands for: feeling curious about the unknown, which might be a moment of surprise, of clashing worlds, of excitement. It is these moments that are at the core of MOMO.
Nine of our favourite souls were asked to join this campaign, each of them has their own story and unique relationship with us, some of them on stage, as part of our program. Others stand in front of the stage each year to celebrate that their love story started at MOMO Festival many years ago. Each of them will share their story with you. For the coming nine weeks we will publish a new story each week.
Gil The Grid
Gil ’the Grid’ Gomes Leal is a movement artist, dance performer, and the artistic leader of Amenti Theater Company. He has been working with Motel Mozaïque for over five years, carrying out a series of notable performances, workshops, and photo exhibitions, such as Elemental Exchange, Ayahuasca and Cacao Ceremony (2019), Kali (2021) and Lilith (2022). We support Gil under ‘de Nieuwe Makersregeling’ (of The Performing Arts Fund NL), a regulation that supports young professionals in The Netherlands through coaching and financial support.
Read more here!
Amber Docters Van Leeuwen
Amber Docters Van Leeuwen is a multidisciplinary artist that combines different disciplines with her cello playing. Her first time at MOMO was last year when she created an installation for the festival.
When we asked her about her first impression of the MOMO Festival, she said “When I talked to the MOMO team even before attending the festival, I remember thinking ‘This festival is not just a festival. It is really part of Rotterdam and part of the community” This realisation of what MOMO is was very special because MOMO is more than just a festival to me. I am grateful for the MOMO family for their support and look forward to creating a new piece for MOMO” She also pointed out the diversity of the audience. “It’s an incredible mixture of people and it’s so wonderful that MOMO brings everybody together. I experienced a bustling and bubbling feeling at MOMO and it really gave me a very warm fee
Read more here!
Hugo De Man
Hugo is a young professional who joined the MOMO Community in 2022 as part of the Young Talent Club, in support of the Volunteer Coordinators Sigrid and Kerensa.
2022 was also the year of his first visit at MOMO Festival: “It was a cool experience; the first time at MOMO I was directly in the heart of the business. It was amazing. I met some new people and such enthusiastic people who really follow the dream of MOMO. Before I was studying at Zadkine, an event business school in Rotterdam, and my teachers always told me about how MOMO is a really empowering festival: there are always opportunities for young creators, emerging and big artists!”
Read more here!
Sharvin Ramjan
Sharvin is a creative consultant, moderator, artist and talent coordinator whose first encounter with MOMO Festival was when he hosted a panel talk at MOMO Playground on Schouwburgplein.
Reflecting on this experience, he told us: “It was very interesting. I did interviews with a variety of artists as a moderator. Even though I work in the cultural sector myself within arts and design, I did not know a lot about the music industry. So it was quite interesting to learn about new artists, what they are doing, how they work, and how they contribute to the world as artists. I found that very inspiring
Read more here!
Anne-Fay
We recently announced a line-up for MOMO Festival 2023 and that includes a special project by an artist who collaborated with us many times: Anne-Fay’s Reaspora.
Over the past years MOMO followed the artist’s trajectory in search for her ancestry: Anne-Fay and her brother and filmmaker Felix travelled along three continents to follow their family diaspora in the opposite direction. From the Netherlands through Aruba and Curaçao to Suriname, China and Ghana, they searched for the stories of their ancestors. They met their relatives, visited special places and made music with local producers. The music was compiled into the album ‘Reaspora’.
Read more here!
Didi Kreike
Didi Kreike is a multidisciplinary creative and performer who has been active in theatre and television for the past years and recently launched the new project R3LN4CHT. He’s been involved with MOMO in more occasions and he told us about his first experience as a visitor during last April.
“One of my most valuable memories is that I came from a performance at Theater Rotterdam, in the Kleine Zaal and then there was a very intense ‘gabber party’ going on in the Foyer with very loud music, after which I rejoined a mini concert. The shock I felt from the first performance and then dancing wildly with everyone afterwards made it a very nice experience.”
Read more here!
Gert-Jan and Eveline
Our ambassadors Gert-Jan and Eveline met at our festival and have been visiting us ever since. Recalling their first meeting Gert-Jan told us they “were introduced to each other through friends at the MOMO Festival in 2010. That evening we went to see a then new and upcoming band called Mumford & Sons in the Schouwburg. After the concert it was very crowded in the hall and on the way to the exit I said to her ‘just hold my hand’ and from that moment on I never let go of her hand. Since that moment we have visited the MOMO Festival together every year. Part of this memory is one song the band played that ended up being special to us is Little Lion Man, we also played it several times at our wedding.”
Read more here!
Elia Vitadamo
Elia Vitadamo is the Company Manager and Creative Producer of Amenti Theatre Company. Thinking about her connection to MOMO Festival she recalled the first collaboration with Amenti in 2018, when Gil The Grid and Wesley Rommy presented the duo performance Anima.
“It was a sort of pop up performance next to WORM. It felt almost intimate, even though it was outside, I think also because the show was about such a vulnerable topic, a lot of people stopped and came to watch. At that moment I fell in love with MOMO!”.
Read more here!
Set design
For this campaign we collaborated with Elsemarijn Bruys, who created the set design custom made for this festival’s edition. Elsemarijn is a Rotterdam-based multidisciplinary artist whose work revolves around using air and fabric to create inflatable designs, which caused the fabric in the campaigns set-design to be constantly moving and breathing. A work that playfully invites the viewer to interact with the work, as were our ambassadors, who walked, danced and hugged the inflatable artwork.
> Elsemarijn Bruys
The wooden box was built by Bode Packaging.
Photography & Video
The talented Ashley Röttjers photographed this campaign. The bold, sharp and outspoken signature of Ashley’s photography radiates through the campaign, showing each of the model in their own unique character. Her work is completed with video’s shot by Rotterdam based Studio Nul, who also created the amazing artwork for this years festival edition.
> Ashley Röttjers
> Studio Nul
