For your own good
Duration: 22 min
An atmospheric short film exploring the blurred boundaries between dreams and reality, where a lone wanderer discovers fragments of their past in flickering nighttime landscapes.
Am, i an object?
Duration: 22 min
With the film project Am I, an object Francis delves into the blurring boundaries between the body and the object. The project takes place in a funeral home wherein he explores subjects such as funeral care, death rituals, and the hierarchical relationship between the artist and his sculpture. The film employs satire, humorously questioning concepts such as authorship, originality, and value. In it, two performers are presented as sculptures, their bodies manipulated and moved by the artists. But conflict arises when discussions emerge about who is the most original – the artist or his creation?
The contentious dialogue comes from the lyrics of funeral hymns. The lyrics are constructed through errors occurring in mistranslations to English and through disparities between English and non-English language hymns. Francis found this process of lyric-making significant as it questions meaning-making and authenticity. What does it mean for something to be original? When we think of mourning processes and discussions of death, we often insist on stressing the departed’s individuality, what makes them special, one of a kind.
Copy and paste
Duration: 22 min
Within the performance and video work “copy and paste” i invite people from the public to enter the installation and take on the role of the teacher in front of a class of four ‘students’. In front of the class the assistant of the teacher helps people from the audience to to
recite from a scripted text. The text refers to dogma’s around art and has been run through Google Translate multiple times, causing errors that needs to be negotiated while reading it out loud. During the performance, both scripted and unscripted mistakes are made. Every time someone makes a ‘mistake’, the teacher’s assistant cleans up the person who made the mistake. In this way, a process is created in which all the participants in the room: audience, performers and artists have an influence on what is labeled as ‘fault’.
By taking inspiration from the quintessential spaces for education, control and discipline, i try to flesh out a space that is familiar yet reminds us of those situations of subjection. The heightened awareness in this space, further amplified by a large ballet class like mirrored wall in the middle of the space, all windows covered with vaseline, a steel mortuary table and a series of morphic sculptures that occupy the space as silent spectators, confronts the visitors with what is left of us after endless loops of cleaning.
In Copy and Paste I perform the role of the teacher assistant, helping the audience member perform their role “correctly” by giving instructions such as how to say lines or how to stand. In this manner, my role functions as that of a hidden authority figure. Similarly to an automatic spelling corrector installed on your computer, these authority figures are often less visible than a teacher in a classroom, but interfere a lot with our sense of right and wrong. My role in this setting is to almost become what people colloquially refer to as “the system”.
A love letter
Duration: 22 min
Ballet is an art form in which a mass of bodies is trained to move in exact synchrony and perfect harmony. Every dancer mirrors the other, impeccable control turns them into one. But a body cannot be controlled it generates ‘errors’, stimuli, idiosyncrasy. I’m drawn to those unharmonious chords that interrupt the ideal of the symphony. With my work i rebels against the
normative idea of beauty, which aims to make a unified whole from a mulititude of diverse bodies. I rebels against an invisible authority, a social dicipline that a times manifests itself concretely, but more often is latent and orchestrates behavior almost imperceptibly. Especially because i want to highlight the beauty of those out-of-the-tone details: the corporeal, the exceptional, the particular.
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