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 video works and installations. The language of video montage, audio, voice and setting, helps me translate personal quests and scale them with universal topics. It takes me to a kind of vulnerability that lets me better question human constructs and our complex world.
I studied Biology and hold a masters in Environmental Sciences. How an ecologist views the world is fundamental in how I approach stories, history and art: ever connected, ever evolving, ever generating. An individual fragment does not exist. My video shots and story elements can multiply, fuse, be reused, reconstructed and adapt into complex site and time specific narrative works.
Since 2020 I investigate the whitewashing of my ancestral tribe, the Minahasa. I find nonlinearity not merely a form, to me it functions as an essential decolonizing tool in both approaching history as in telling the untold.
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