MOMO Festival

MOMO Festival is Motel Mozaïque's three-day weekend through rooms in Rotterdam. Stichting Motel Mozaïque runs it, at Schiekade 189, unit 404, postcode 3013 BR. Harry Hamelink founded it. On 13 September 2023 alderman Said Kasmi gave him the Cultuurpenning, and Hamelink stepped down as artistic director. He stays on as founder and programme maker. The general director is Margriet Colenbrander, who came in as business director in the autumn of 2021. The head of programme is Enoma Amayo. OOR spells Colebrander once and Colenbrander in the body. The two spellings stay side by side. The office also runs a concert series and a talent workshop, apart from the weekend.

The weekend Wim du Mortier walks, in MuziScene on 21 April 2025, is 17–19 April 2025. The piece calls it both a twenty-five-year existence and a jubilee edition. De Kettingzaag, the same day, says it was the twenty-fifth time. The two counts stay side by side, and so the first year is not pinned to one digit. Du Mortier describes a crowd with money to spend, very busy jobs, and an age when there are still no children or the children have already left. People who hardly show up in the small rooms the rest of the time. The weekend was pleasantly busy and did not burst. He missed V11 and Arminius. The wristband is exchanged at the desk on Schouwburgplein 25. Each room has a capacity: when it is full, one comes in and one goes out. The access mail is support@motelmozaique.nl and the general mail is info@motelmozaique.nl.

On Friday, Pem opens alone at Worm, in a nearly empty room, visibly embarrassed. The room slowly fills. She sings about gulls and kingfishers, and says her father, dead a few years earlier, watched birds, and that she carried it on. Du Mortier hears a clean high, in the manner of Minnie Riperton, and a low trill that reminds him of Katy J Pearson. At the start she misses a note, hoarse. Pem had already passed through Left of the Dial. In the Waalse Kerk, Anna B Savage sings with a young band that knows how to play very soft and very loud. Mike Lindsay is not there, and the sound turns more folk. The album You and I are Earth does not run the set. A Common Tern, from the first album, and The Orange do, with the line that if this is all there is. The photo of Squid, the headliner, is by Niek Hage for Motel Mozaïque. Years earlier Squid had played at Roodkapje.

At Club Sahara, Helena Cazaerk, of Maria Iskariot, shouts in a way du Mortier does not see the voice surviving. Twice she goes into the crowd: once so everyone shouts that she likes it, and once up on their hands, almost against the low ceiling, while they cover the Pixies' Tame. On Saturday, very early, the Berlin trio Goblyns turns the same room into a sauna. They play psychedelic rock, mostly instrumental. People compare them to Khruangbin and du Mortier says there is no kraut, that the bass sometimes growls, and that devoted fans are already in the small club. Yard, from Ireland, starts from techno: beats that push and bass in the diaphragm, a noise guitar beside two people on laptops, and the emo that Emmet White shouts. Master Peace, Peace Okezie, turns Perron upside down in a little over half an hour: a tape, a live drummer and a guitarist worthy of air guitar. As he leaves, the room sings I don't wanna go home, less it's with you, and he plays it again, smiling.

Mich, from Amsterdam, brings the album Chair and runs through nineteen short songs, indie pop with an eighties sauce. Bassist and singer Bastiaan Bosma jokes that his band is the best of the weekend and announces each song as a very good number. Vampire Boyfriend, led by Janine van Osta, plays at Muziekwerf, a reconstruction-era church by the architect Gerrit Kuiper. Michell Quitz is missing. Guitarist Tim Roos, of Indigo Pastel, steps in. Van Osta's jumpsuit zip stays open and she borrows Sophie Reekers' bra. The single Vampire Boyfriend sounds alive. Geordie Greep crosses the Kruiskade on his way to eat and then fills Theater Rotterdam. Ten minutes of noise and almost nobody leaves. Then the band starts a swinging number, and a salsa step appears in the room. Du Mortier sets Mich's nineteen songs against Greep, who in half an hour barely closes three themes. Gurriers sits in the close, without a recounted set.

The organization's own page says that from 16 to 18 April 2026 Rotterdam was the playground again, and it names a later April. This text does not walk that April and does not print its year. In the 2025 recap, the same site speaks of a free Playground on Schouwburgplein and of My First MOMO for children. The weekend the review walks is 17–19 April 2025, room to room, with the wristband on the square. The festival is still that map of Rotterdam.