Hey y’all,
Sorry for being a week late, again. No further intro for now, I have a story to tell.
It’s 2017. A new bar has just opened downtown Amersfoort, The Netherlands, called ‘Tjommies’. Technically the full name is ‘Tjommies Music Bar’ but nobody calls it that in real life. Just ‘Tjommies’, which is South-African slang for ‘friends’, is sufficient. That name may not seem particularly significant at first, but it has proven to be as accurate as it could ever be in the years since.
You see, it isn't just the bar that is new. I am new too. Not new to the city, because I’ve lived here since I was born, but I’m also now 25 years into my life and most of it has happened outside of the city center. That changes significantly when I find a nice little apartment just off the main square. The apartment features a tiny hallway, a separate bathroom housing a shower and the only toilet, as well as a Z-shaped main room for cooking, living, and sleeping. It is a basic studio apartment, but because of the open floor plan, I lovingly refer to it as ‘The Loft’. A ridiculous notion from a distance, even if that distance is just time, but it’s what the apartment represented for me.
Because I’m sorta new in town, I have to rebuild my entire social circle all over again. Most of the friends I had in earlier years are still around, but not necessarily part of my new daily life. It’s fine, this is where Tjommies slots in nicely.
The moment I walk in, I’m greeted by the bartender, “Hey man welcome, my name is Xander, what’s yours?” I’m a little surprised by how forward (and non-transactional!) this opening of our interaction seems. “Hey, uhm... I’m Mitch, nice to meet you.” I stumble into it. The moment my name echoes in the room, another guy comes down the stairs. Long dark hair in a bun similar to mine, some tattoos and an extended hand. “Hi man, Ferdinand!” he says to me. I order a beer and sit down at one of the high tables across the bar. My friend walks in, “hey xan, hey fur! I’ll take a beer please.” They sit down across from me and point at the chessboard on the table, “wanna play?”
A few years pass. I meet the rest of the Tjommies crew, they appear to be family for the most part. Though not all of them. It takes me a while to figure it all out. They seem close enough though. I meet and befriend other Tjommies regulars, strengthen loose connections gathered around the city as well. I gain a vivid memory of calling my future (and in 2025 still current) girlfriend from Tjommies’ terrace to ask if she wants to come hang for drinks. She’s in full pajamas on the couch, ready for a slow night, but still does a quick outfit change to come hang anyway. Ferdinand, now considered a friend, asks if I want to join him and the gang to Wildeburg, some hip new festival somewhere outside town that everybody can’t shut up about, to take pictures (and perhaps do a shift at the bar they are running). I do my second ever exhibition of the pictures I shot at Wildeburg. I called it Wildlife. The exhibition is open to the public at Tjommies for a full month.
I move out of town. Well, out of the city center, this town might forever be home. I do it to move in with Charlotte though. We have a view over the city with the iconic tower on the horizon from our balcony. We adopt two red cats, Bowie and Cobain. Charlotte and I continuously ask each other if we care to have children, but neither of us is highly interested. Our friends have children though, and we love those. We love our friends for building their families. We mostly love to have the two of us and those two cats though. And a balcony full of plants, of course, to make the whole thing as cozy as possible. So we can enjoy that view over the city with the four of us.
Ferdinand leaves Tjommies. I fail to make it to his farewell party. But I’m not sad about it, not for one second, because I know this isn’t farewell. Most of the staff at Tjommies changes over after Ferry’s departure, if they hadn’t left just before that already. It’s fine, and probably about time anyway. Someone else can now run this place, continue to run its thriving community, expand it, welcome new people, and let others pursue other endeavors. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, I promise.
A new beginning. Ferdinand teams up with Rob, another key figure from the Tjommies days. At least, that’s where I met him. That community around Tjommies? It’s getting some competition. Or, perhaps better said, most of that community around Tjommies is moving somewhere else. Don’t worry, Tjommies is more than strong enough to rebuild that community real quick again. Me though? I followed Ferry and Rob to OostWest (also stylized as Oostwest, Oost-west, Oost-West, because nobody could initially decide on the correct spelling, nor did anyone care enough to put a foot down, and it was unanimously abbreviated as OW). OostWest promises to create the space and then serve as the hub for creatives and entrepreneurs from the city. The city is bursting at the seams with creative energy, but there’s no real place for people to go. No place to express themselves. Forced to be infantilized, ignored, ostracized, sometimes even villainized for being different and wanting better things.
OostWest is housed in a few stacks of shipping containers, doubling as a sound barrier for the newly built neighborhood, also made out of shipping containers, and is filled to the brim almost immediately. Facilities, like water, heating, and fresh air, are not great though and the location in the city is uncharismatic and lacks the right energy. Ferry and Rob see this immediately but have to make do with the hand they are dealt. They are lucky to get this place to begin with, in this tight market, and are determined to make the best of it.
I don’t show my face often. After I moved out of the city center and switched positions at my day job a couple of times, I’m focussed on other things for a while. It doesn’t help that my friends offer to pay the rent for a unit and allow me to make use of it as an unofficial tenant too; a way of thanking me for continuously willing to help them with any photographic matters to support their musical journeys. I appreciate and gladly accept their offer at first but ultimately end up having ‘no skin in the game’ and mostly opt to work from home, where I have everything I need anyway, instead of making the cycle out to OostWest to get distracted by all the fun stuff other people are doing.
OostWest moves locations and at first is called “OostWest 2” by some people but eventually is officially named “OostWest City”, although still commonly referred to as OostWest (and still unanimously abbreviated as OW), and I’m with it from the very beginning. I’m even able to photograph the two friends in the old, and now empty, steel mill. Over the years, I get to watch them build up what eventually turns out to only be the first layer of private units for rent. And now, in 2025, I’m joining them again. For real this time.
It's 2025. We’re opening a daylight studio as one of the first units to be rented out on OostWest’s second floor.
An early peek at the studio, on the left image: Ferdinand, Bram and Rafaël during the construction process.
We’re in the middle of the building process right now. It’s going slower than I’d hoped it would go. But we’re doing the best we can, with the time and resources we have. I think some of the fun of doing something like this is finding solutions for the challenges you face along the way. Even if that means friend and co-owner Rafaël has to push aside his entire agenda to quickly fix a mistake I made, to ensure construction doesn’t stall longer than it has to.
It’s fine though. I’m mostly happy we have a plan to begin with. Both me and Raf are completely unexperienced with any of this and, as it turns out, having strong opinions of what it should look like does not magically make those dreams realities. Thankfully OostWest is not just a place. It’s a hub of connection. The same thing Tjommies did for us, OostWest continuous to do; just at a slightly higher, more serious, level than before. We’re all twenty- and thirty-somethings trying to make something out of this creative energy we all experience. It’s both thrilling and contagious.
After long days at OostWest, we like to blow off some steam at our new favorite pub: Kafé van Zanten. It’s where most of our friends, family and rest of the network hangs out. It’s where we go to stay connected to each other on a personal level. If OostWest is our ‘third place’ (although you could argue it’s also the second place for some people, albe that not for me at this stage), Van Zanten is our third-and-a-half place. Not quite the fourth, as that would place it too far down the rankings, but going off the time spent at each, not really a full third. Third-and-a-half makes sense.
I digress. The studio is being worked on and it will take some time to complete it. And even then I imagine it being a continuous work in progress. I will update you all next month, hopefully able to present some significant improvements. Until then, we hang out at Van Zanten after long days of work. But when that closes at 2AM, always move to Tjommies still. The loop is complete, but it’s spiraling upwards.
Mitch
