“It’s too cold for the spirits to live here”

In October 1958, a family departed on passenger ship M.S. Sibayak from Indonesia to the Netherlands. During the one-month voyage and upon arriving in Dutch winter, they discovered the spirits who had always been with them in the tropics, had vanished during the voyage.

In “It’s too cold for the spirits to live here”, Tosca Schift transforms this voyage into a liminal space. At its edges, the spirits linger as a felt absence, haunting what can no longer be seen yet refuses to disappear.

Through expanded cinema, a live radio séance and a performance amidst local trees, the search for these spirits becomes a method. It opens a way into a colonial family history that remained hidden for decades, literally packed away in biscuit tins in an attic. By unfolding this family archive and interweaving it with footage from Schift’s own recent journey to Indonesia, fragmented histories reconnect. What emerges is a layered narrative of diaspora and remembrance, where ancestral presence flickers back into view and the past is not closed, but actively reimagined.

– Eva Langerak

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