Frances Rompas op Boring Festival 2024

The motherland is a dream. Mountainous, hidden in fog with grumbling sulfur bubbling up from her hot springs.

Especially for Boring Festival 2024 Frances Rompas exhibits an experimental film/video-installation that showcases a fragmented mind. Past, present and longing. Belonging? Cut with the real and the unreal. Synthetics versus the natural landscape. Stop. Go. Return. Scored with 1970’s synthesisers and distant exotics. Freeze. Insert smoke machine.

Set in Teylers Museum this video work gains an extra layer of consequence. Within the tradition of enlightenment, world-explorations and the urge to collect objects and phenomena, to understand more of the world we live in, Frances Rompas decolonises the origin myth of her Indonesian tribe.

The video’s biographical starting point takes the visitor from the internal world of the maker through a search for history. Hoping to conclude with an universal longing for a deep connection with ancestors, nature and natural sites. Genius loci.

About the artist:
Frances Rompas is visual artist, filmmaker and DJ. Her art projects have an essayistic nature and often involve artistic research. She sees video’s ability of including emotion into knowledge is essential to unravel complex issues. Bringing people together in a physical space to collectively walk an emotional pathway is her way of coping with today, and to activate social cohesion.

Her presentation at Teyler’s Museum is part of the development of “Toko Waar Is Thuis” supported by NL Film Fund. Artistic research for this work has been supported by Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie and K.F. Hein Fonds.