Mandy Franca
I think it's very important to make contact with material. By working with oil pastel and pushing it onto the paper, I can put myself in the work. I try to make a kind of connection with the memories I have of the image.
Mandy Franca (1989, the Netherlands) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is an ongoing investigation into interconnectedness, shaped by growing up between the Netherlands and Curaçao and by her personal archive. She closely observes everyday life, giving lasting value to seemingly ordinary places, objects, and moments. Preserving languages, traditions, domestic settings, and daily rituals that are constantly shifting through globalization and digitalization is central to her practice. By connecting personal memories to shared experiences, Franca reveals how care, belonging, and human relationships are rooted in the things we often overlook.
Working across photography, printmaking, drawing, collage, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, Franca challenges traditional approaches to image-making by combining analogue and digital processes. Photographs taken with her smartphone become the starting point for layered works in which print, mark-making, and different materials intersect. These overlapping layers reflect the complexity of living simultaneously across physical and digital worlds, while questioning ideas of materiality, reproduction, and the photographic image itself.
