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2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Tags: Amsterdam, art, club culture, film, music, research
RoXY wasn’t just a club. It was a fuse.
A wired-up experiment in freedom, joy, and collective creation.
And like all good experiments, it ended in fire.
This film is a love letter to the people who danced, built, and believed.
It’s a call from the past that sounds like the future:
bass-heavy, body-first, no permission asked.
The soundtrack isn’t nostalgic—it’s insurgent.
It moves from Digital Justice’s whispered breakdown to the raw breath of Fingers Inc., from the machine-funk of The Black Dog to the rave-mysticism of The KLF.
These are working-class rhythms, warehouse emotions, underground signals.
Music for people shut out of galleries but never out of possibility.
RoXY stitches itself from the same spirit that ran through Amsterdam's anti-institutional imagination:
— Nelly van Doesburg demanding revolution
— Willem Sandberg turning museums into playgrounds
— Constant’s New Babylon building anti-capitalist
— Provo chalking anarchist poetry onto police horses
— Wild Plakken papering the streets with protest, colour, and care
— Aorta and Amok making galleries from squat walls
This is a tradition of art that doesn't wait to be invited in.
It throws the door open—or kicks it off the hinges.
And at the centre of it all is the youth.
Dancing, screaming, building light from sweat and sound.
Poor kids, weird kids, queer kids.
Making something bigger than themselves and calling it home.
This is what RoXY shows:
Not a monument to the past, but a manual for the now.
If you want to know how to live otherwise—
Start with a beat.
Then invite everyone in.
"The work underlines how apparently fleeting, hedonistic phenomena, like dance clubs, can be spaces for complex pan-sexual, multi-racial cultures where experimentation, innovation, questioning of norms, and political change are modelled, encouraged, and produced. This work conclusively proves for me that histories, social movements, music, and moving bodies can and should coexist.” — Tony Cokes, artist and Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence
"Peter Giele would be proud." — Rob Schröder, filmmaker, Amsterdam
"The most dynamic, colourful and moving documentary ever made about the history of Provo and youth culture of Amsterdam, and especially Club RoXY. This is a must see for all the original RoXY people and future generations, lovers of freedom, creativity love and good times. Made with love." — Eddy De Clercq, RoXY founder, Amsterdam
”Assembled from archival footage and interviews, it captures past utopian moments and teases out potential old threads - the 'anti-museum', everyday resistance, Situationism - that might be picked up and reimagined by younger folks in the present. It’s 20 minutes well spent!” — Seb Chan, ACMI, Melbourne
”Juha van ’t Zelfde's film 'RoXY', which we showed in "Sweet Harmony", was a true revelation to me. In it, Juha makes the connection between Amsterdam's socialist, anarchist and free-thinking artist movements like CoBrA, Provo, Fluxus and even punk, showing how all of this radical imagination led to the founding of the RoXY.” —Kim Tuin, director of Het HEM
"The political and aesthetic relationship between the Dutch avant-garde and house music was really something new for me, especially portrayed in this way. This work, more than just record it, wants to invent that relationship, here and now." — Rogier van Reekum, assistant professor at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam
"This is a wonderful short film about a slice of history of underground dance music in Amsterdam. Absolutely banging soundtrack that makes me want to go out dancing right now!" — Andrew Sleigh, Plus X, Brighton
"Just because of the great music you should watch this film, but also because of the incendiary inspiration it expresses." — Thomas de Groot, Commons Network, Amsterdam
”Adam Curtis eat your heart out!” — Cleo Campert, RoXY photographer, Amsterdam
”Juha van ‘t Zelfde’s film RoXY was shown with its seminal soundtrack blasting through an impressive soundsystem and accompanied by LED-panels that heightened and extended the overall sensorial and immersive experience of watching the work. It deliberately tried to move away from a static spectatorship to elicit something that would more closely embody the energy of the RoXY itself, therefore turning the work into an active installation that makes the audience a part of it.” Daan Knijnenburg, Haarlem
Archival footage from: AVRO, KRO, NCRV, MTV, NOS, TROS, VARA, VPRO, YouTube, Fondation Constant, Rogier Ploeg, Harrie Wildeman, Rabotnik TV and Rob Schröder.
Soundtrack:
1. It's all gone pearshaped / Digital Justice
2. Free Yourself / Virgo
3. Virtual (Gods in Space) / The Black Dog
4. Omnipresence / Future Sound of London
5. We is 1 / The 2
6. Be master of one's own house / Unknown
7. I'm Strong (instrumental) / Fingers Inc.
8. Future F.J.P. / Liaisons D.
9. Fuck the industry and motherfuck radio man / This is B.U.G.
10. Factory (Parallax mix) / Set Up System
11. What time is love (original version) / The KLF
https://www.mixcloud.com/viralradio/juha-roxy/
Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2021 https://ontwerpvanhetsociale.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/roxy-nightclub-cultural-crowbar
Thanks to: Guusje Segond von Banchet, Darco Cezveciyan, Rob Schröder, Robin Pocornie, Terra Dakota Stein, Amie Galbraith, Rana Hamadeh, Johan Grimonprez, Menno Grootveld, Rudi de Groot, Rogier van der Ploeg, Marina Otero Verzier, Katia Truijen, Ina Hollmann, Cleo Campert and Gaika Tavares.