Clarissa Tossin (born 1973) is a visual artist from Brazil and based in Los Angeles. Her collaborative, research-based practice develops alternative narratives found in the built environment, using elements of installation, sculpture, and moving image to explore intersections of place, history, and aesthetics.
Early life & education
Born in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, Tossin grew up in the capital city of Brasília. She attended college in São Paulo at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), then moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to pursue graduate study at CalArts, receiving her MFA in 2009.
Work
Tossin’s work upon moving to Los Angeles often referred back to her previous life in Brasília, using her own migration as a mode of understanding modernity, urban development, and globalization. Her installation Brasília, Cars, Pools and Other Modernities (2009-2013) establishes an architectural bridge between the two cities: Oscar Niemeyer, responsible for Brasília’s urban plan, also designed the Strick House in Santa Monica. Through videos, sculptures, photographs, and ephemera, including a 1973 Volkswagen Brasília loaded with pool-cleaning equipment, the work brings out the cities’ shared architecture, swimming pools, and car culture, as well as their convergent histories of urbanization alongside the burgeoning auto industry and highway infrastructure, elaborating their paradoxically utopian and dystopic place in the global imagination.
Tossin's next major body of work focused on the Amazon region and its histories of industrial incursion and architectural displacement. The video and sound installation Streamlined: Belterra, Amazónia/Alberta, Michigan (2013) deal with Belterra, a rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, and Alberta, Michigan, an Upper Peninsula sawmill town, both modeled on New England villages and built concurrently in 1935 to source materials for auto manufacturing in the United States. Encontro das Águas / Meeting of Waters (2018), an installation investigating the manufacture of electronics in the Free Economic Zone of Manaus, includes terra cotta casts of electronics produced in Manaus, woven satellite images from the region sourced from Google Earth, and cut down Amazon.com delivery boxes woven into baskets.
Climate crisis & space exploration
Much of Tossin’s most recent work examines the origins and impacts of the climate crisis, increasingly through the lens of 21st century space exploration. These works connect plans for mining and settlement of the Moon and Mars with terrestrial legacies of resource extraction, colonialism, and environmental degradation on Earth. According to curator Sandrine Wymann, “Tossin contemplates the day, not far off, when we exhaust this planet’s resources and flee to Mars to begin anew, as an extra-terrestrial civilization with no choice but to continue elsewhere or perish.”
The suspended, double-sided circular weavings in A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky) (2019) interlace satellite views of the Amazon River and 2019 fires in Amazônia with NASA images of the great Martian plain Amazonis Planitia and the Milky Way, comprising woven patterns that resemble agricultural land partitions viewed from space. Similarly, Tossin’s Future Geography (2021) weavings combine strips of Amazon.com delivery boxes with NASA images of Shackleton Crater on the Moon (proposed site of the first US lunar ice mining facility), Jezero Crater on Mars (landing site of NASA's Perseverance rover), and the Hyades star cluster (the nearest to the solar system), highlighting the intersection of scientific and commercial interests in space exploration.
The 8th Continent (2021), a triptych of large-scale jacquard tapestries commissioned by Rice University, represents the culmination of Tossin’s interest in science and commerce converging in outer space. Working with Rice’s Space Institute and Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, Tossin sourced NASA images surveying the Moon’s permanently shadowed polar craters for concentrations of water ice, to be mined for use in making hydrogen fuel for deep space ventures, including NASA’s proposed Artemis missions. Mapmaking has long been used to establish and project territorial sovereignty, and NASA’s surveys of lunar resources are no exception. Harking back to the gilt and silk threaded tapestries of the medieval and Renaissance periods, Tossin recontextualizes these images within a regal tradition of showcasing sovereign wealth and power; metallic gold threading indicates likely stores of lunar ice—the gold of the future.