FRANK

- Premiere May 2025 -

Unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman, something of a strange or terrifying shape, a deviation from the normal, an imaginary creature, the hybridity that we cannot comprehend, a threatening otherness, making the Self perish.

FRANK, as in open, honest, direct, and short for Frankenstein, is a project where the quest of distorting the familiar continues as Cherish Menzo dives into the monster's figure, its various relations to the human, and the horrors these relations entail.

More so than (re)producing a physical or visual portrayal of the monster, Cherish Menzo is interested in how monsters are a reification and metaphoric embodiment of the beliefs and narratives that terrify and horrify us. For FRANK, she deviates from the monster being something we must overcome, conquer, master, cast off, etc. Cherish researches the process of bringing the pre-monster stage or horror into a metaphoric embodiment and for that process to be the generator of image-making and the performative, sonic and text material that plays with the tension of ambivalence, uncanniness, enigma, and uncertainty.



In continuation of JEZEBEL and DARKMATTER, in FRANK, distortion will once again be one of the main ingredients to generate material. In addition, Cherish will look into the action of decay and how something gradually breaking down and getting less or worse can be another attempt to distort a form or information.

FRANK, will be the closing of a trilogy.
A trilogy that does not consist of chronological storytelling or a series of events, but maybe more a trifold of spaces, universes, fictions, and conversations that regard Blackness, bringing the Black body to the center and attempting to explore the African Diaspora's multi-intersections in recognizable, metaphorical, and abstract ways.