It’s Too Cold for the Spirits to Live Here
by Tosca Schift
Research & project
In my research project It’s Too Cold for the Spirits to Live Here, I adopt a mode of spiritual searching as a means to find the spirits my father lost when he fled from Indonesia to The Netherlands in 1958. It is an attempt to illuminate and unfold the complexities of a colonial family history that has long remained hidden, literally stowed away in biscuit tins in the attic. By unveiling the family archive – the passports, the letters, the negatives – ancestral stories become tangible again: vivid, immediate, and alive in the present. This archival material is interwoven with footage from my recent journey to Indonesia, creating a layered narrative that bridges personal experience with historical displacement.
A recurring element in the work-in-progress cut of my new film is the M.S. Sibajak – the ship that carried my family from Indonesia to The Netherlands. Reimagined as both a portal and a vessel, the ship sails not only across oceans but through time itself, where past, present, and future collapse into one another. Within this expanded spatial-temporal state, the lingering presence of the spirits haunt the peripheries, suggesting the persistence of colonial memory in both embodied and spectral forms.
As a filmmaker, the research has profoundly shaped the development of new lenses through which to view and represent my subject as I cultivate a deeply embodied approach, closely aligned with method acting. Through a metamorphic process of self-transformation, I consciously moved beyond my inherited Dutch framework. This introspective and embodied methodology became a gesture towards decolonising the narrative and expanding the frame of reference to other worldviews.
Tosca Schift
Tosca Schift is a Dutch artist and filmmaker whose practice spans video art, film, performance, and the (de)construction of objects. With a background in product design, she developed a deep sensitivity to the physical relationship between the body and objects—an inquiry that evolved into a moral engagement with the politics of possession and a heightened awareness of the body as a carrier of experience. Her work engages with embodied memory, from epigenetic inheritance to the inner dissonance of the body itself. Tosca Schift blurs the line between the past and the present, using this tension as a gateway to explore spatial liminality, shifting realities, and the fragile thresholds between reason and madness.
Between 2019 and 2024, Tosca Schift was part of the collective ANT EYE, under which she screened and exhibited her work on a variety of international platforms, including the Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, Lehmbruck Museum, Fashionclash Festival, Go Short International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, and The Grey Space in the Middle.