As a multidisciplinary artist Mandy Franca researches the influence of the digital realm on artefacts, mundanity and the influence of migration.
Franca’s 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 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 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 is currently a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She obtained her MA in Print with distinction at the Royal College of Art in London, UK (2020), and wrote her dissertation on the impact of the digital realm on identity, the influence of migration and the artefacts of our time. She completed her BA in Fashion at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2016), and she has a degree in Media Design from the Graphic Lyceum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2009).