The project emerged from my desire to better understand what is passed from one generation to the next, often without words and sometimes without our awareness.

The life and writings of my grandmother, Diana Fransz-Rompis, became the starting point for a personal search into my Minahasan heritage and the ways in which memories, stories and ways of seeing continue to resonate in the present.

Weaving together photographs, landscapes, portraits, interiors, cultural objects and my grandmother’s handwritten notes, Queen of Batu unfolds as a layered visual narrative in which different times and perspectives quietly meet. Past and present exist alongside each other, carried through people, places and objects.