Maps don’t tell all. An L.A. artist looks at what’s left out
Clarissa Tossin, “Corso del Fiume delle Amazzoni fino a Marte,” 2023, Archival ink on Amazon envelope.
(Brica Wilcox)
This story is a part of “Clearance,” a design problem that peels again the layers of aspirational structure in L.A., and envisions a extra stunning future that lives rather less on the nostril. Learn the entire problem right here.
I got here of age in Brasília, which is such a selected metropolis — it’s a deliberate metropolis by the architect Oscar Niemeyer and the city planner Lúcio Costa, they usually had been very a lot serious about Le Corbusier’s Modernist beliefs. The city plan follows the Cartesian form of an airplane. As a younger woman, I used to be at first somewhat troubled and scared, not understanding how one can navigate that place, however then I used to be actually mesmerized by how stunning some buildings had been. As a result of I grew up there, it’s dwelling — you begin having a distinct relationship with the house as a result of it’s the place that you just stay in.
I feel what that have did by way of the way it influenced my work later as an artist is that I’ve at all times been very delicate to the house round me. I grew to become very accustomed to hyperanalyzing visually and bodily what’s round me, as a result of it was such a robust and powerful expertise that I had at an early age.
I discover concepts of place in my work — it’s at all times about deconstructing concepts of place or questioning how we outline a spot. Mapping, which is current all through my work, is a technique of doing that. A map is a illustration of a spot, and, as any type of illustration, it’s very biased in what you resolve to incorporate.
A element of Clarissa Tossin’s “Corso del Fiume delle Amazzoni fino a Marte,” 2023.
(Brica Wilcox)
On this new collection, I’m utilizing Amazon envelopes and drawing maps on them. I began utilizing Amazon packaging as a result of I used to be within the relationship between the phrase Amazon for the e-retail retailer and Amazon for the forest — should you say “Amazon” as we speak within the U.S., folks will take into consideration amazon.com and never the forest. I used to be additionally serious about how Amazon packaging — the ever present stays of client society — stands for extractive cycles of manufacturing and consumption, which in the end affect the environment.
I’ve been taking a look at Portolan charts, the European navigation maps from the 1500s and 1600s. The extreme colonial drive towards the surroundings began in that interval. I needed to attach these maps that had been used to outline the land lots of the globe that we have now as we speak — all of the world atlases and maps had been created from that interval — and equate them with twenty first century house exploration. There’s a narrative within the media that house exploration will assist us resolve issues on planet Earth. The thought behind twenty first century house exploration appears very targeted on extracting assets from different celestial our bodies, which replicates the European navigation period that was all about attending to different locations the place you can discover assets to deliver again to Europe, be it folks or gold or one thing else.
“I discover concepts of place in my work — it’s at all times about deconstructing concepts of place or questioning how we outline a spot,” says Tossin.
(Brica Wilcox)
The map featured right here is named “From the Amazon River to Mars,” however in Italian (“Corso del Fiume delle Amazzoni fino a Marte”). I analysis and discover maps which can be actual Portolan charts and I begin my drawings from them, so there’s a little little bit of transferring sections of precise Portolan charts. The one which I’ve is an early Italian map of the Amazon basin, so I simply took the precise title of the map. I put a drawing of Mars on the backside, so you’ve what seems to be just like the Amazon River that results in Mars. We navigated the globe first, and now we’re going past that — however with the identical misguided, extractive colonial mentality. I additionally pulled from one other map of the Amazon that had some vegetation which can be native from that space, and I like how they mix with Mars, that it’s this surreal place. Scientists consider that there was water there sooner or later, which might have enabled life much like planet Earth. So I feel it additionally performs out this want to search out life as we all know it on Earth in different planets, somewhere else, however equating that with all of the problematics of the European navigation period of the 15-1600s.
