For the first time in 22 years, the famous Student Room Festival (Stukafest in Dutch) has been cancelled. There is not enough staff to organise the event. This was announced by the cultural organisation Culture on Campus this week.

The festival during which bands and acts perform in student rooms was founded in 2001 in Nijmegen. Under its own name, Stichting Stukafest organised an annual event that grew into a national phenomenon with editions in sixteen different cities. For Nijmegen, however, 2023 will go down in the books as the year the festival was cancelled for the first time.

Not enough interest

‘That is of course incredibly sad’, says chair of Culture on Campus Igor Delen. ‘We saw it coming for a while now. There simply wasn’t enough staff to be found. We tried posting vacancies via HAN University of Applied Sciences in order to recruit interns, but there wasn’t enough interest.’

‘We’re just going to try again next year’

The cancellation is a great loss for students who look forward to the festival every year, but also for the participating acts. ‘Especially for bands and acts who are just starting out, Stukafest is the perfect stage.  Because of the cancellation, talented artists cannot showcase themselves to the student audience.’

Board

To avoid having to deal with the same disappointment next year, Culture on Campus is looking at other options. ‘We want to fill the positions within our own board in the normal way again. Currently, some board members have two roles. We will also start recruiting for the committee and we will post a vacancy at HAN University of Applied Sciences again. We are also looking at the possibility of appointing a permanent programmer who, together with a committee or interns, can focus on external collaborations, such as with Stukafest.’

Fans of Stukafest can still visit other cities. The editions in Zwolle and Utrecht are already over, those in Delft, Leeuwarden, Groningen, Eindhoven and Rotterdam are yet to follow. Leiden, Amsterdam and Tilburg do not yet have a new edition of Stukafest on the agenda.

In Nijmegen, no event will replace Stukafest this year. However, the possibility of using the festival’s budget for another purpose is still being looked at. ‘But apart from that, we’re just going to try again next year’, Delen concludes optimistically.

Translated by Jan Scholten