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Frances Rompas (1987) has in recent years researched her ancestral tribe, the Minahasa in Indonesia. This ethnic group was once held up as a model of successful Christianization: within just three generations, it was fully ‘whitewashed’: Christian and westernized, in the service of Dutch trade. Trained as a biologist and of mixed Indonesian heritage, Rompas grew up in her parent’s Indonesian grocery shop, knowing Indonesia only through the products sold there. To gain a deeper understanding of her background and identity, she conducted archival research, gathered documents and travelled to Indonesia, where she took numerous photographs and recorded videos. Together with notes and poetic observations, these elements come together in an ever-expanding web. By repeatedly rearranging components of this web, 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.’
The Exotic Fruit Section (2026) is one such non-linear narrative. In its constellation of filmic fragments, a longing for decolonized roots is tangible. The work raises questions around connection, potential, growth and the imbalanced, neocolonial distribution of products. The chapel-like setting in which the film is presented alludes to Christianization, while the semi-transparent plastic curtain evokes a cold storage facility for tropical fruit: imported produce that can no longer hold meaning for the land from which it originates.
Written by: Esther Darley