¹⁴WORM

In 2000 the venue-and-shop became an organisation. Dodorama, shop and podium together, merged with a film workshop and with Popifilm to form WORM¹. The name looks like an acronym but is not one. It arose spontaneously, and Werk Overleg Rotterdamse Media is Mariëtte Groot's own tongue-in-cheek backronym, invented after the fact; it is not what the word means².

The new organisation had a board, and the building now had to hold it. A probable reconstruction makes Jeroen Chabot, director of the Willem de Kooning Academie, its first chairman, recruited by Hajo Doorn, Mariëtte Groot and Hans Beekmans³. On that probable reading the board met at Rochussenstraat 169, including on 11 September 2001⁴.

What WORM said about itself in these years survives mostly in its own web archive.

What the building now sent out mattered as much as what it put on stage. WORM ran two record labels from no. 169. Z6 released electronic music, and by January 2002 it had three CDs out: Frans Friedrich's Radio Symfonica, Huib Emmer's Radion and Donker Hare Joe's Drone Joke Yeah. Its sublabel ZZZZZZ records carried, among others, AA Kismet, the band of the venue's own programmer Lukas Simonis with Bob Rake¹. In 2001 Simonis and Henk Bakker founded WORM Sound Studios in the same building². The discography lists what those labels pressed, with the venue's other recordings.

The oddest product was not music at all. The event-management software Stager was probably conceived in WORM's office in the building, where the administrator, Mike van Gaasbeek, who was managing a repetitive strain injury with Dragon speech-recognition, devised a web tool built on one principle: enter each event once, and end duplicate data entry³. The short deep dive on WORM's technology follows how a concert calendar became working software.

Labels and board aside, the venue was still a workplace, as the corner had been for most of the century before. A contemporary report of January 2002, taken here as probable, puts WORM's staff at Rochussenstraat 169 at eight people on the Dutch subsidised-job schemes of the day, WiW and ID¹. It adds that the record shop, owned by Mariëtte Groot, was kept administratively separate from the concert podium². So the old workplace now held eight people on subsidised contracts, running a music foundation.

The corner also appears in the city's big year. Among the project files of Rotterdam's 2001 turn as European Capital of Culture, the Stadsarchief catalogues a cultural project called Ruis Reis, attributed to Dodorama³.

The programme kept its reach to the end. On 27 February 2002, according to release data taken here as probable, Sakada, the trio of Eddie Prevost, Mattin and Rosy Parlane, played and was recorded live at WORM on the Rochussenstraat; Matchless issued it as MRCD49, with the track named simply Worm - 27.02.02¹. On 7 February 2003 Konono No.1 from Congo played the corner with The Ex, on the group's first European tour².

The first physical piece of venue ephemera located for the address is a Stadsarchief poster, catalogued as Collectie Affiches nr 2003-144³. It announces a WORM pop-music programme for 1 to 13 November 2002, op haar eigen locatie in de Rochussenstraat, on its own premises on the Rochussenstraat, alongside dates at club Las Palmas and club Nighttown⁴. Nearly four months later, WORM's archived agenda billed the Eddie Prévost Project of 8 March 2003 as the Laatste concert op de Rochussenstraat 169, the last concert on the Rochussenstraat⁵. Who else played the corner in the venue years is listed in the performance register, and what was pressed to disc there in the discography.

WORM later told its departure as an eviction. Its own retrospective essay, which the site treats as probable, calls the corner de eerste WORM locatie, een kraakpand aan de Rochussenstraat, the first WORM location, a squat on the Rochussenstraat, from which the collective was uitgezet, evicted; it marked the end with a Schluss Party in November 2003¹. The deadline had passed long before. According to a contemporary report of January 2002, the collective had already missed a reported 1 December 2001 date to vacate the building for demolition, with nowhere yet found to go². According to a 2015 thesis, after the corner the foundation was dakloos, homeless, and nomadic for a year before it found the former VOC yard in Delfshaven³. These last steps rest on WORM's own retrospective, a contemporary news report and a single thesis rather than on a court file, so each is carried as probable.

What is certain is that both phases of the corner kept their own websites, and enough of those pages was archived that the programmes, the venue labels and the last-concert billing can still be read⁴. The WORM web archive brings together those pages, the venue's own later account of its history and its Wikipedia entry.

Who actually owned the building through the squat and the venue years, and could set a demolition date on it, is still not established; that question belongs to the closing era. The demolition all this pointed to was never carried out on the building itself. What spared it, and what the furniture works turned music venue became after 2003, is the next chapter.