I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me

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 (2026), 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.

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.

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.


The exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is curated by Delany Boutkan.