Clarissa Tossin

1973 — Porto Alegre, Brazil

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Clarissa Tossin — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Clarissa Tossin, © Photo: Noah Stone

Brazilian visual artist.

Clarissa Tossin, who received a BFA from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil in 2000 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 2009, works with moving-image, sculpture and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonisation. Through a mix of research, storytelling, and gestures of mapping and layering, C. Tossin places seemingly disparate elements into conversation, generating unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. C. Tossin’s childhood in Brasília heavily influenced early films and installations deconstructing Brazil’s modernist history, which over the years have expanded to encompass geographies ranging from her adopted home of Los Angeles to the vast realms of outer space.

From the solo exhibition Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2021) to solo shows at the MCA Denver (2022) and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2023-2024), the artist has woven terrestrial histories of resource mining and their material detritus with the imminent colonisation of life in space. Take Future Geography (2021–ongoing), a series made by flattening, cutting and weaving Amazon delivery boxes with NASA images of the Moon, Mars, stars and galaxies. The laborious process of construction quite literally intertwines capitalism on Earth and the commercialisation of space, translating the unrelenting drive of extraction into shimmering tapestries pulsing with the energetic geometries of Brazilian Neo-Concretism and the seduction of a shiny new object.

Elsewhere, the presence of fossilised trash and three-dimensional casts of objects – ranging from the silicone cast of a decomposing Sycamore maple tree in Death by Heatwave (Acer pseudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest) (2021) to the skin-like latex cast of the Volkswagen automobile model Brasília in Transplanted (VW Brasília) (2012) – conjure ghostly traces of the afterlives of consumption. The artist has contemplated the effects of industrialisation since early bodies of work focused on the Amazon region. In the video installation Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia/Alberta, Michigan (2013), for instance, C. Tossin layers footage of two nearly identical Ford Motor Company towns in the Brazilian Amazon and Alberta, Michigan to produce a disorienting portrait of global production.

Another important focus in C. Tossin’s work is the co-optation of pre-Columbian iconography in the 1920s Mayan Revival style architecture prevalent throughout Los Angeles. The single channel video Chu’u Mayaa (2017) foregrounds the Indigenous symbology of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House through a dance performance by Crystal Sepúlveda, whose movements draw from gestures and postures found in ancient Maya ceramics. Her subsequent film Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing (2022), included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York, centres on two other Mayan Revivalist landmarks in LA, the Sowden House and the Mayan Theater. C. Tossin and her various collaborators use poetry, spoken word, music and glyph-writing to perform a kind of healing ritual that re-signifies both spaces within a Maya lineage. That C. Tossin sees moments of dispossession as opportunities to play, to introduce speculation, is most poignant in the film’s soundscape. Unfamiliar sounds coming from 3D-printed replicas of Mayan wind instruments held in pre-Columbian museum collections fill our ears, offering not an authentic reconstruction of the past, but an open invitation to question the ways history is made and codified.

Mariana Fernández

A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.