Building
Communal
Vessels

Ibelisse
Guardia
Ferragutti
&
Frank
Rosaly

String 4tet of Elisabeth Coudoux, Lucija Gregov, Mary Oliver and Laurel Pardue lighting up the DOKZAAL in Plantage Dok during
CALL Festival 2024. Photo by Alejandro Ayala.

TRACING THE LINES

NO. 3

CLUB CHOLITA

We have this living-in-Amsterdam luxury problem: super talented musician friends are constantly passing through this port city looking for a spot to crash, to play, to meet the community. With just over one million residents, you can imagine that the music scene, while vibrant, is pretty small. The handful of established venues are booked far in advance, so friends often ask to put small shows together. In 2016, we started Club Cholita (named in solidarity with the powerful femme-folk work-ing-class in Bolivia) as an excuse to harness said luxury problem.

To start, we had a last minute let’s-get-Inge-brigt-Håker-Flaten-an-intimate-solo-show kind of attitude and brought it to fruition alongside our studio spacemate Jochem van Tol. We used our large studio space, which sounds fantastic and feels a bit like a living room, as well as a garden shed. We organized pop-up shows for pals. Our living room was a hotel, and a place to catch up with our globetrotting friends. For us, creating this space for sharing was rewarding enough, and continues to be a big part of what drives our own development as artists.

MOLK FACTORY

Across the hallway from our studio looms a beautiful performance hall famous for recordings of the extraordinary improv scene—Tristan Holsinger’s solo cello album, A Camel’s Kiss, and Wilbert de Joode’s Olo to name only a couple. Alongside the hall is a cafe space. Below that, a little black box basement space. It’s all within a big building owned and operated by the squatters who occupied it 25 years ago. It’s in the center of Amsterdam, inhabited by a large collective of diverse artists and initiatives who practice sovereignty in a multitude of ways. We have Vokomokum, a non-GMO food market once a month; ASEED, a social justice and environmental initiative; Taste Before You Waste, a weekly and affordable vegan dinner, repurposing crates of wasted food in perfect state by restaurants and supermarkets; a DIY artist-in-residence program; refugee housing, particularly during the beginning of the Ukraine War...the list goes on. These examples illustrate the inspiring community-based enterprises happening parallel to Molk Factory in the building we call Plantage Dok.

Around 2020 we decided to take it up a notch and get a bit more organized. We rechristened Club Cholita with the umbrella title Molk Factory and began booking a monthly series rather than just hosting events just for our traveling friends’ music at the last minute: multi-media performances, lectures, film screenings, listening sessions.

Then COVID hit, closing a few autonomous creative platforms. Several organizations, like DOEK and De Ruimte, lost governmental support. The situation became ripe for us to take on more responsibility to create an artistic haven for the growing vacuum in our community.

What has been most interesting for us is taking on hyper-creative curation, the dramaturgy of an evening, and working hard to overlap an evening’s bow to illustrate the relationship between different scenes and bubbles that exist here. We try to represent the older generation of improvisers, but also to relate their universe to what’s happening in the noise, punk, theater, new classical, electronic, art-science / art-of-sound scenes as well. We work hard to create a space of inclusivity for POC and marginalized folk who struggle with cultural separations. In addition, at each show we have a small pop-up shop that hosts records, merch from visiting artists, and electronic instruments from Bolivian/Argentinian DIY maker De La Puta electronics— items that would otherwise be unavailable in Amsterdam. Our aim is to become a DIY distributor for folks who struggle with getting their music / products to the western markets.

In June 2024 alongside IARC, Space is the Place & Subbacultcha, we initiated our first C.A.L.L. Festival, bringing folks from Chicago, Amsterdam, London and L.A. together for an all improvised, first-meeting celebration with a pop- up record shop & snack bar. It was a smashing success and we plan on making it an annual thing.

Molk Factory is now a team of 5, including Rosa Ronsdorf and Noralie vd Eijnde, in addition to Ibelisse, Jochem and Frank. Together we are continuing this conscious curation to keep on connecting these ideologies, approaches, and languages that, to our minds, all relate to one another.

Molk Factory views.
Photo by Alejandro Ayala.

Frank looks on as Dave V fills Molk Factory HQ with merch during CALL Festival. Photo by David Allen.

We, the people, exist as living spaces. We’re cupbearers of experience and knowledge that we schlep along, defining who we are, where we come from, what we value, and how to share that space. For Frankie, he’s carrying a lifetime of experience from his tenure in the Chicago music scene, whose elders and younger generations left a huge impression. He carries a deep-rooted memory of territory: the Arizona low and high desert. The soil and ancestry of Puerto Rico exists in his cup as a living memory. His spirit-body carries wisdom and experience that translates into music, which is a space as well.The act of creating is a temporal space, coupling performers with audience, vessels in a space, in momentary connectivity. This shared experience bridges the multitude of carriers being carried. Spaces. In a space. Within spaces.

In the case of Ibi, she’s informed by the altitude of the spaces of mountains & ancestral wisdom of languages. In Aymara (Andean language), the word “music” doesn’t even exist. But “sound” is considered a living entity, or space, which exists in all of what surrounds us and which moves with the seasons and with the rites of all that live. Singing to the passing clouds before the rain season is as important as making sound for other humans. That ancestral wisdom of languages has traveled with her, now living in Amsterdam and being informed by conceptual spaces where the connectivity that carries a community is palpable. Made urgent by spaces full of energy, where the “medium” of the art is simply a vessel— a container that moves through all bodies present, via word, sound, or image in the space.

The autonomous space, however, one where the shit can go down, is an elusive joint. Gentrifi-zoning, power-wielding protectionism, naturally occurring separation of scenes... they all create a distance from like-minded movements within a community. We find that artists (can) hold space for collective experience. We are a space. One that traverses the earth, sharing music and experience with people in spaces. One that feeds into the ideology behind MOLK FACTORY and all that we hold dear.

Plurality moves us, those microorganisms or spaces— in the cultural gut— that include real chance as part of the score. Institutionalized art, even though we need it and are part of it, tends to cut those frictions, those lively intentionalities, that which can’t be tamed. We love keeping a space weird, undefined, uncontrolled, messy, transgressive. Adopting the space and the vessels of luxurious spaces, we see our- selves tending and caring for that. For our community close by and far away.

Come visit!

Plantage Dok scenes, including an archival photo of the building’s post-war chapter as a printing press.

Tracing The Lines is a creative exploration of International Anthem Recording Co. and the community that surrounds it.

Issue #3 is available.

This third annual installment explores the concept of Space as it relates to that community and the world as a whole—spaces that humans inhabit, spaces where humans create, spaces where humans meet & live, etc.

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