The festival, organised by the Uilenstede Residents Association (VBU) and Prime Events on Saturday 11 September, offered an opportunity for past residents to relive their student times and reconnect with their peers. Organisers gave tours of apartments around Uilenstede to help guests revisit memories of their living spaces, while the festival grounds included a reunion zone where old photos of the campus could be browsed and videos of events that took place around the complex in the previous century played on a large screen.
As various bands and performers took the stage, former residents mingled in the crowd hoping to run into their friends from back in the day. Organisers provided identification stickers displaying details such as the address where each person had lived and the year they had moved in, to make it easier for old pals to find each other.
While the main theme of the festival aimed at reuniting past residents, the event also catered to current students with a line-up of DJs going late into the night.
Strange and nostalgic
“We had too much fun”, is how Herbert Ormel, who moved to Uilenstede in 1976 while studying Geography at VU, remembers his time at the campus. Hanging out with a group of friends who decided to attend the festival together, he reminisces about student life in the Uilenstede community, which included many wild parties he attended as a member of the campus football team.
Like many other guests, Ormel decided to attend the festival in the hope of reconnecting with friends he had made during his time living at Uilenstede, many of whom he had lost touch with. It felt “strange” to visit the campus after all those years, he says, but also “nostalgic”.
Missing Uilenstede
The idea for the reunion festival started with Tom Siebring and Tom Tetteroo, former Uilenstede residents who left the campus two years ago. “We missed Uilenstede already and wanted to see if we could find a reason to come back”, says Siebring.
Last year, when they realised the 60th anniversary of Uilenstede was coming up, they decided to use this opportunity. With the support of VBU, Prime Events, and Duwo, the event came to be.
One of the reasons a reunion like this had a chance of attracting enough attention is the sheer size of Uilenstede, which some claim to be the biggest student campus in Northern Europe. With the complex housing around 3,400 residents, the number of people who have lived there over the years made it more likely that enough people would show up, says Siebring.
Dirty dancing
“Uilenstede parties always ended very late”, remembers Annemieke Boosten, who decided to attend the festival in the hope of reconnecting with friends she made at the campus in the mid-1980s. Despite always wanting to, she was not allowed to move to Uilenstede as she lived with her parents in Amstelveen, which was too close to the campus.
This did not stop her from becoming entangled in Uilenstede’s social life, as her boyfriend at the time introduced her to some campus residents. Boosten often visited the complex during her studies, and made many memories she remembers vividly to this day.
One night she recollected seeing Dirty Dancing in the cinema with her friend and then heading to an Uilenstede party together. “We did dirty dancing at the party”, she says, laughing, and adds that she had come home so late that the sun had already risen.
Aart Leemhuis, a retired GP who moved to Uilenstede in 1968 while studying Medicine at VU, remembers being an editor at a local, student-run newspaper active on campus. A special memory of his is when local elections for the Amstelveen government took place. In the evening, the newspaper got the results from a voting station at Uilenstede and quickly included them in a special issue, which he and his colleagues managed to distribute around the campus that same night. “The whole community knew what the result was.”
Married at Uilenstede
Discovering these kinds of stories was one of the main hopes for the festival, says Siebring, who had listened to plenty of them throughout the event. “I heard lots of stories from couples that met each other at Uilenstede and are still together, or groups of friends that still meet up either to read, to play cards or just to hang out”, he says, adding that he also met a couple who got married at the campus. “Uilenstede has had a big impact on people’s lives, including mine.”
The festival may have been the first of its kind, with none of the organisers and attendees remembering any Uilenstede reunions happening in the past. Tetteroo admits he had been nervous about the unique formula of the event, which combined very different age groups, but in the end he was pleased with the result and saw “a lot of connection between different generations.” “It would be super nice if, in five years, we have another reunion”, he adds.
Not every attendee seemed to have run into old acquaintances. Halfway through the event, both Leemhuis and Boosten were yet to meet any long-lost friends. Ormel was luckier, reuniting with a friend he had not seen since moving out of Uilenstede. “It was very special”, he says about the encounter. “I feel like we are going to talk a lot tonight.”