SCHIEDAM.- Every breath contains traces of other bodies, climates, environments and histories. The atmosphere endlessly circulates across planetary and historical time, carrying particles that have passed through oceans, plants, infrastructures and countless human and ecological lives. Air moves across borders that remain politically, technologically and geographically divided, binding bodies and environments through invisible yet shared conditions of circulation.

In I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me, Rotterdam-based artist Mandy Franca approaches breathing not simply as a biological process, but as a shared infrastructure through which bodies, technologies, climates and geographies continuously pass through one another. Bringing together photography, painting, moving image, sound and textile, the exhibition explores how intimacy, memory and presence are shaped by the systems that connect us across distance.
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​Working from her personal digital archive developed by the artist and her family between the Netherlands and Curaçao, Franca draws on phone recordings, family voices, ventilation systems, slowed-down videos and digitally reconstructed skies. Developed through experiences of physical distance, prolonged periods of illness and physical immobility, the works remain attentive to breathing as both a bodily rhythm and a collective condition. Air emerges throughout the exhibition not as empty space but as an inhabited medium carrying memory, longing, grief and material traces of other lives.

Ecologies of Connection ​

​At the centre of the exhibition is Solace (2020), a three-channel video installation in which slowed-down footage recorded while travelling between Curaçao and the Netherlands dissolves into fields of colour and movement. Ambient aircraft noise and voices singing in Papiamentu transform flight into a suspended condition between places, temporalities and bodies.





In The Air in Between (2026), photographs taken by the artist and the artist's family on Curaçao are brought together with digitally generated skies reconstructed from historical weather data and video game software. The work produces unstable encounters between lived memory and computational simulation, allowing separate moments and locations to briefly overlap.

Rather than positioning technology as opposed to intimacy, Franca examines how relationships are increasingly formed, maintained and remembered through systems of transmission, circulation and atmosphere. Mobile phones, digital archives, weather datasets and domestic interiors become part of the same ecology of connection. Remaining close to the textures of everyday life, I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me considers how breathing continuously binds the human body to that of others through air, and therefore to larger social, ecological and planetary bodies.

Mandy Franca

​As a multidisciplinary artist, Mandy Franca’s (b. 1989, Rotterdam) work is an ongoing investigation into the notion of interconnectedness, drawing from life experiences which are informed by growing up in a cross-cultural environment and her personal archive. She researches and observes the meaning of mundanity to give eternal value to seemingly insignificant places, moments and objects. As a result the notion of preserving languages, traditions, domestic settings and everyday objects in a state of flux — meaning — digital and physical due to digitalization and globalization, takes precedence in her work. Franca’s priority is to bring the individual experience into a broader communal context and show the parallels between our common needs, objects and experiences with the notion of care as a fundamental aspect of being.

As an artist she subverts and challenges the traditional application of printmaking by experimenting with a range of artistic mediums which intersect at painting, photography, print, drawing, collage, video, sound, sculpture and installation using the photographic image — taken with her smartphone, and mark-making as a recurring element. Exploring experimental forms of print in combination with analog techniques creating a juxtaposition between surfaces and the image. The application of layering in her work is to display the complexity that makes up the present as a marker of the simultaneous. With these techniques Franca wants to challenge ideas of digital materiality, painting and the reproductive image.

Mandy Franca was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, NL (2024). She obtained her MA in Print with distinction at the Royal College of Art in London, UK (2020). Franca has been the recipient of different grants, among them the four year Mondriaan Fund, Artist Basic grant in 2025. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL); Kunsthal, Rotterdam (NL); TENT, Rotterdam (NL); Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam (NL); Harlesden High Street, London (UK); Bernheim Gallery, London (UK); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (UK); Night Café, London (UK), Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (NL) and Galerie Caroline O’Breen, Amsterdam (NL). Her work can be found in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), Vontobel, Zurich (CH) AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL), and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (NL).