ARTIST STATEMENT
My family name must have been a pun from my ancestors. I just learned, Rompas means greedily in search for food, foraging. So fitting! Because with that same hunger, I collect, film and make story elements, artefacts, fragments, symbols, use theory, clues in nature and archives, remnants and floating feelings. And my grocery bag? Like with the carrier bag theory of fiction, but weavable into many shapes to provide either a research structure or a literary vessel from which I cook up essayistic works and installations.
I studied Biology and hold a masters in Environmental & Resource Sciences. How a biologist observes the world is fundamental in how I see history and approach art. I take an ecologist's perspective on narratives. This level of non-hierarchical and network-based thinking has proven to me a necessary method in decolonizing both history and nature.
The language of video montage helps me with this. Assembling poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, lyrical or descriptive, voice or non-verbal, in image or sound, the essay film and installation become to me sculptures of attention. It takes me to a kind of vulnerability that lets me better question our human constructs and complex world.
Since 2020, I've been investigating my ancestral tribe, the Minahasa - the main scholarly example of deep Dutch colonial assimilation.
Rompas creates vivid, non-linear narratives through which she approaches the colonized past. She seeks to detach the experience of history from linear thinking in order to avoid the pitfalls of Western notions of progress. As she puts it: ‘You could compare it to a bowl of noodle soup, full of intertwined noodles. If you pull on one strand, everything begins to move, and a new perspective emerges.’
- Esther Darley for Mondriaan Fonds 2026
Frances Rompas (… 's current) central question is how one experiences a colonized history, and how one retells the stories of these ancestors in a decolonizing way. (…) The jury appreciates her inventive way of connecting the personal to an urgent theme in a very unique and poetic manner, and is convinced that now is the moment to conduct this research. Frances’s proposal touched the jury and makes one curious about the form.
- Jury Report K.F. Hein Stipendium 2024
