I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me explores how a longing for closeness can persist, even when direct contact is not always possible. For this solo presentation at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, artist Mandy Franca (Rotterdam, 1989) transforms one of the museum’s attic spaces into a spatial installation featuring photography, video, and sound. Air forms the point of departure. Air separates people, yet at the same time brings them together, no matter how far apart they may be. Breathing thus becomes a way of bringing what is distant a little closer.
Mandy Franca, Close Up – MARK II, 2024, oil pastel, voile, enamel paint on wood, image courtesy of the artist.
Breathing is proximity
For Mandy Franca, breathing is not only a physical act but also a metaphor for a continuous exchange between body and environment, between proximity and distance. Air is a connective space between bodies, but also a boundary. It brings people together while separating them at the same time. For Franca, breathing is almost a form of thinking: a moment of pause and stillness.
During periods of prolonged illness, when she is largely confined to her home, air becomes one of her most important connections to the outside world – and at the same time a reminder of what remains out of reach. Air also connects her to family on Curaçao, while simultaneously separating her from them. For Franca, air therefore becomes a space of longing: the view beyond the window, the island she continues to yearn for. As Franca puts it: “Every inhalation draws the world inward, transforms it, and releases it again.”
Mandy Franca, Solace, video-installation, 2020
iPhone photographs of the everyday
Many of the photographic and video works were created with different smartphones, by different hands and in various locations around the world. The images emerge from everyday actions, voices, rituals, and movements – those of Franca herself and of her family members. Together they form a shared field of experiences in which distance is sometimes bridged and sometimes made tangible.
In Western art history, air, the open sky, and vast landscapes have long served as metaphors for freedom and infinity. Franca questions this assumption: the expansive sky is not a promise for everyone. For some, it mirrors physical limitation. The works invite visitors to look and listen attentively, drawing attention to what is usually fleeting or barely perceptible.
Beyond its personal and metaphorical meanings, Franca also raises questions about the significance of air in a world marked by distance, technology, and social inequality. What does it mean to share the same air and what determines how that air is experienced?
Mandy Franca, Self-portrait, Studio in Rotterdam, 2025
About Mandy Franca
Mandy Franca (Rotterdam, 1989) works with painting, photography, collage, sculpture, sound, and video. After exhibitions in cities including London, Amsterdam, and New York, and a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2022–2024), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam now presents a solo exhibition of her work in one of the museum’s attic galleries.
Themes such as time, distance, and connection frequently recur in her practice, as do questions about how technology shapes our experience of them. The physical distance from her family on Curaçao has given Franca a sharp awareness of simultaneity and separation. Marking time became a way for her to bridge absence and to hold on to life – even when lived far apart.
She creates her photographic images using her mobile phone and subsequently alters them by hand. By combining analogue and digital techniques such as oil pastel and inkjet printing, she explores and reinvents traditional printing processes.
Emerging talent
Each year, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam offers two young artists the opportunity to create new work for one of the museum’s attic galleries. Since the 1950s, the museum has focused on “artists of our time,” encouraging the development of emerging talent in the visual arts – from the Cobra artists, who once sparked a revolution in Dutch modern art and from whom the museum’s renowned Cobra collection emerged, to the present day.
The exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is curated by Delany Boutkan and forms part of ArtBase, a pilot programme exploring how visual art can be meaningful within the region. ArtBase is made possible by the Mondriaan Fonds.
Header image: Mandy Franca, Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds, 2025, photo by Vinx