My family name must have been a pun from my ancestors. I just learned Rompas means greedily in search for food. Fitting! With that same hunger, I collect, film and compose story elements, artifacts, fragments, symbols, theory, clues in nature and archives, remnants and floating feelings. With this I cook up essayistic works and installations.
I studied Biology and hold a masters in Environmental Sciences. How an ecologist observes the world is fundamental in how I see history and art. I take a biologist's evolutionary perspective on story, treating narrative as an alive entity affected by evolutionary forces and characteristics. It has proven for me a necessary approach in decolonizing histories, freeing up myths and state narratives from dominating pitfalls of linearity. Resulting in a freer and more imaginative way of telling a truth.
The language of video montage, audio, voice and setting, takes me to a kind of vulnerability that lets me better question our human constructs and complex world. Assembling poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, lyrical or descriptive, voice or non-verbal, in image or sound, I treat the essay film as a sculpture of story, time and attention.
Since 2020 I investigate the whitewashing of my ancestral tribe, the Minahasa.
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