About the ArtistClarissa Tossin, a 2017–2018 Radcliffe fellow, works across media to investigate ecosystems of material production, the hybridization of cultures, and the persistence of difference. The exhibition Future Fossil is an extension of Tossin’s fellowship project, Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters), which investigated the manufacturing of mass-produced goods in the Free Economic Zone of Manaus in the Amazon rainforest and indigenous cultural production in the region.

Originally from Brazil, Tossin is based in Los Angeles, California. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; the Hammer Museum; the Blanton Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; the Queens Museum; the Blaffer Art Museum; SITE Santa Fe; the Wattis Institute; Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery; SESC Pompéia, Brazil; and Fundação Iberê Camargo, Brazil; among other venues. Tossin received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.

About the Radcliffe InstituteThe Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is a unique space within Harvard — a school dedicated to creating and sharing transformative ideas across all disciplines. Each year, the Institute hosts 50 leading scholars, scientists, and artists from around the world in its renowned residential fellowship program. Radcliffe fosters innovative research collaborations and offers hundreds of public lectures, exhibitions, performances, conferences, and other events annually. The Institute is home to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, the nation’s foremost archive on the history of women, gender, and sexuality.

For more information about the people and programs of the Radcliffe Institute, visit www.radcliffe.harvard.edu.

January 31–March 16, 2019Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery 

CLARISSA TOSSIN

Future Fossil

Future FossilAn exhibition by Clarissa TossinJanuary 31–March 16, 2019

Johnson-Kulukundis Family GalleryRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard UniversityByerly Hall, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

WORKS ON EXHIBITION

Future Fossil2018, cedar tree trunk, rocks, roots, leaves, bark, soil, sand, plaster, cement, silicone, foam, resin, aluminum foil, electronic waste, recycled plastics (PET, HDPE, LDPE, PP, and PS) 20 ft. × 14 in. × 17 in.

Spaceship Earth2018, woven baskets created from Amazon.com boxes and archival inkjet prints on glossy photo paperThree baskets 23 in. (diameter), one basket 19 in., one basket 14 in.

#AmazonisPlanitia2018, series of archival inkjet prints on glossy photo paper, recycled melted plastic55.1 × 38.3 in.34.9 × 12.7 in.20.7 × 29.9 in.19.6 × 11.2 in.16.9 × 12.2 in.

You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone)2019, looped sound, voices of author Octavia E. Butler and Apple Inc.’s iOS virtual assistant, Siri

Throughout this publication, the titles of works in the current exhibition are set in bold italics.

Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts Jennifer RobertsArts Program Manager and Future Fossil exhibition curator Meg RotzelFuture Fossil exhibition producer Joe Zane

Across Space and Time: Clarissa Tossin’s Future FossilBy Rachel Vogel

ON AN EARTH RAVAGED BY WAR, with humanity gasping for its last breaths, an alien species called the Oankali rescues the shattered remains of the planet and its inhabitants. Stripped of its interstellar creatures, however, Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rights, 1988; and Imago, 1989) is funda-mentally a story of humanity’s stubborn insistence that the human race ought to continue on, despite its inevitable self-destruction. Such a bleak conclusion rings all too true in light of the 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which unequivocally warns that our own actions are causing irreversible and irreparable damage to the planet. Our ability to survive on Earth will be compromised unless unprecedented, large-scale coordinated action is immediately taken.

Clarissa Tossin’s exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute, Future Fossil, uses Butler’s trilogy as a starting point for her own speculation on the future — the material

Akin went to the door and spat outside several times, spat away pure pain as his body fought to deal with what he had carelessly taken in. … “The picture — the plastic — was harmful to you?” … “It was … more poison packed tight together in one place than I’ve ever known. Did Humans make it that way on purpose?”

 Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rights

on exhibition Future Fossil (detail)

3

above and right Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (video stills), 2013,

two-channel HD video projection (15:00 min. each), eight-channel sound installation, Belterra wooden bench replicas, photograph

traces that serve as the Anthropocene’s calling card after its self-induced ecolog-ical apocalypse. This fictional world to come holds open a space to reimagine our present. The Oankali’s relationship to their environment is one of complete symbiosis: everything (including their spaceships, homes, and transport vehicles) is considered a living being that must be cared for. In this exhibition, the Brazilian-born artist juxtaposes our current extractivist approach to Earth’s natural resources with indigenous understandings of human beings as part of nature. How might we rewrite the end of our own story by conceptualizing the world as an integrated assemblage that includes people, nature, and the built environment?

In the Xenogenesis trilogy, humans and aliens are sent into the Amazon to forge a new hybrid civilization. The Amazon rain forest is a recurring thread in Tossin’s body of work — a particularly rich site for investigating the implications of global capitalism’s commodity chains. In a group of projects from 2012 to 2013, Tossin explores Henry Ford’s rubber plantations and company towns in the Amazon: the ill-fated Fordlândia, which lasted only three years before workers rioted, and Ford’s second attempt, in Belterra. Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012) combines satellite images of Fordlândia’s remains with the postindustrial landscapes of Detroit and other cities printed on the verso. The former site was sacrificed and exploited to support the hungry industrial needs of the latter, which were themselves later sucked dry and cast aside. In Geographic Accident (9,468 miles collapsed) (2012), When two places

look alike (2012–2013), and Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (2013), Tossin uses maps, photographs, and video to compare and contrast Belterra with another Ford company town in Alberta, Michigan, which was developed around its sawmill. These planned towns not only pattern domestic life and daily habits around the needs and demands of industry but also model a global order organized around the extraction of natural resources.

While a 2017–2018 Radcliffe fellow, Tossin completed Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters), a project focused on the Amazonian port city of Manaus, where indig-enous Brazilian communities and the export of commodities from Brazil’s Free Economic Zone converge. In her research for the exhibition, Tossin studied tradi-tional Amazonian practices such as Baniwa weaving techniques and terra-cotta casting. The centerpiece of the installation features a satellite view of the stretch of the Amazon river that connects Manaus to the Atlantic Ocean — the same stretch of river that cargo ships traverse to bring materials into Manaus for processing and to take manufactured goods out for global distribution. The image is inverted and then woven onto itself in a 50-foot vinyl tapestry, mirroring the meeting of the Río Negro and the upper Amazon River at Manaus before they empty into the Atlantic. The tapestry is suspended so that its woven plaits tumble down like a waterfall before flowing across the room, and is surrounded by terra-cotta replicas of Apple and Coca-Cola products and woven baskets made from strips of Amazon.com

4 5

above and right Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters), 2018, woven archival inkjet print on vinyl (4.5 ft. × 50 ft.),

terra-cotta objects, fishnet, thread, woven indigenous baskets and backpack made of Amazon.com boxes (installation view: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin)

boxes. Traditional techniques of indigenous Brazilian culture collide with the mass manufacturing that fills Manaus’s industrial center. In Spaceship Earth, the woven baskets are transformed into their own revolving planets. Each component of the baskets — Amazon.com boxes; satellite images of the Amazon rain forest, Mars, and the Milky Way; and traditional weaving techniques — alludes to a different under-standing of global connectivity, now inextricably intertwined and circling alongside the others.

Consistent across Tossin’s practice is her sustained engagement with material culture: her investigation into a society’s objects and modes of production, and what they teach us about its members’ practices and everyday rituals. The exhibi-tion’s eponymous Future Fossil — what Tossin describes as a “core sample of the future” — tracks humanity’s history through its waste and refuse: the plastics that make up so much of our current world, accumulating and never fully breaking down. Tossin has probed this theme in previous work. In Spent (2009–2011), she collected her domestic waste and fossilized it into delicate pieces of porcelain, which simultaneously incinerated the garbage. In Transplanted (VW Brasilia) (2012), her

examination of the automotive and rubber industries of Brazil culminated in a latex cast of a Volkswagen Brasília. Tossin’s attention to the specificity and meaning of materiality connects her previous practice, based in large part on historical research, to this current project — a methodological departure in its speculation about a future rather than looking to the past.

IN 1968, BUCKMINSTER FULLER popularized the concept of Spaceship Earth, connecting the urgent need to think globally about problems of resource usage, environmental impact, and international diplomacy with the sensational achieve-ment of sending humans into space. In order to sustain equilibrium in the global ecosystem, we — much like the crew of a spaceship — must think of ourselves not as constituents of separate nations, locked into struggles and hierarchies of power, but, rather, as equal members of an interconnected community working toward the greater good. In our own time, as the ramifications of global capitalism are borne out in the effects of climate change, the idea of space travel emerges once again as a potent image and a horizon of opportunity. Will NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers

6

ever suggest that terraforming the Red Planet could move from the domain of science fiction into the realm of possibility? Meanwhile, from SpaceX to the adver-tising campaign for the iPhone XR, could the promise of space travel be merely an alibi for continuing to neglect our own planet? In Study for a Landscape (Mars) (2012), Tossin takes a satellite image of Mars and folds it into an origami rocket. When unfolded, the creases remain, an indelible interruption of the landscape. The series of works in the current exhibition, #AmazonisPlanitia, bear satellite images of Mars and melted plastic from the artist’s own waste — entering Earth’s future fossils into a cosmic exchange.

In its play with temporality, the exhibition Future Fossil emerges as a kind of dialogue: a conversation between different periods, or a suspended moment of collision between our past, our present, and our future. The audible heartbeat pulsing through the exhibition is a discussion between Octavia Butler and Siri, You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone) — an exchange that reaches across the physical and the digital, the now and the before, the here and the beyond.

As the recent election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency demonstrates, our present teeters precariously on a brink. Bolsonaro’s proposed

Spent, 2009–2011, porcelain and trash, dimensions variable

Study for a Landscape (Mars), 2012, archival inkjet print, 30×30 in.

policies threaten both the environment and the livelihood of indigenous Brazilian communities. Now is the time we must reflect back and look forward; we must be willing to open up dialogue and to reconceptualize our understanding of our place on, and relationship to, Earth. What will we leave behind? What will remain as humanity’s legacy?

Rachel Vogel is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art + Architecture at Harvard University, where her research focuses on the intersection of craft, industrial production, and artistic practice.

8

on exhibition Spaceship Earth (detail)

CLARISSA TOSSIN ARRIVED at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2017 for a fellowship in the visual arts. As a member of a convivial class of 50 fellows from across the arts, the humanities, and the sciences, she pursued her project Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters) and initiated what would become Future Fossil. A frequent visitor to her studio, I was particularly attracted to Tossin’s searching approach to material and form that crossed boundaries of time and media. Her focused interest in cultural production in and around the Amazon Basin drove her to various corners of the University: the Harvard Ceramics Program, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and even the Harvard Recycling and Surplus Center. Tossin’s cross-campus curiosity prompted me to invite her to create a new body of work for the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery as a means of capturing some of what was happening in her studio.

Tossin and I had worked together in the gallery when I organized In Any Direction, the Radcliffe visual artists’ exhibition of works in progress. This is where I first encountered Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Upon a simple table, Tossin had placed a beat-up copy of Imago from the Harvard Library next to what looked like an ancient ceramic bikini. The object is a “ceramic leaf effigy,” or an ornamental apron, originally from Marajó — a large island in the Amazon Basin in Brazil — lent from Harvard’s Peabody Museum. The link between the female artifact and Butler’s science fiction novel (whose protagonist is the mother of a hybrid human-alien species) captured my imagination and led us both to the exhibition Future Fossil. Below are some of our conversations in and outside the studio, which underpin Tossin’s ideas and decisions that went into the making of this new body of work.

meg rotzel: You introduced me to Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy during your Radcliffe fellowship year while I was reading Butler’s Parable of the Talents. Her books have a grip on many readers during what seems to be a global ecological crisis enveloped in a worldwide political one. You mentioned that your sculptures consider skin, the actual container of our bodies. From “living walls” to the transfor-mation of human-alien hybrids, the motifs of skin and embodiment also fill Butler’s trilogy. I’m interested in how you consider the role of the body in the context of your art making.

clarissa tossin: I tend to favor sculptural procedures that emphasize tactility, such as mold making, imprints, and casting. All these processes map the texture and capture the surface (and real scale) of things. My sculptures embody materiality

Make Your Own WorldsA conversation between Clarissa Tossin and Meg Rotzel

on exhibition #AmazonisPlanitia (detail)

13

CT: The title work, Future Fossil, is a “core sample of the future,” made from my own plastic waste melted and combined with other materials such as floppy silicone, plaster, cement, and organic matter — rocks, pieces of roots, branches, trunks, bark. The materials used are a combination of recycled materials and materials purchased specifically for this project, but there’s a focus on plastic components and other materials that can’t be recycled and are leaving an indelible mark on our environ-ment.

This 20-foot cylindrical “core sample” is meant to materially reflect the contradic-tions of our relationship with the environment — as are the ubiquitous Amazon.com boxes “recycled” into Baniwa woven baskets. We need Earth’s natural systems to be in a healthy balance in order to survive as a species, and yet our collective behavior is mostly menacing toward it.

In the course of making this work, I’ve wondered what a core sample of Earth taken 1,000 years from now will look like. How much plastic and other nonrecy-clable materials will remain in Earth’s geological sedimentation, and for how long? The core sample is my fantasy of that object with a sprinkle of sci-fi content. Add to that an image of a fallen tree trunk supporting all that waste, and you have the full picture.

MR: When we first started talking about this exhibition, you had already settled on a title. Future Fossil, and the references in each of the works, move across a spec-trum of time. How are you thinking about temporality?

CT: Whereas most of the fossils we know consist of animal carcasses and plants imprinted or encased in sandstone, a fossil of the future will most likely be the imprint of a crushed soda can or a plastic water bottle in human-made minerals such as Fordite (old automotive paint that has hardened), plastiglomerate (natural debris held together by hardened molten plastic), or trinitite (glassy residue left on the desert floor after the Trinity nuclear bomb test). Thinking about the toxic, nonbiodegradable, lifeless materials of today as fossils conjures up a pretty grim image of the future.

All the works in the exhibition merge past and future: a core sample made of synthetic plastics and silicone; indigenous baskets made from Amazon.com boxes and woven with images of Mars, the Milky Way, and the universe; and the disem-bodied voices of iPhone Siri and Octavia Butler talking about the future.

MR: Thinking about the materiality of geological time, I’m curious about your terra-cotta color palette. You’ve spent some time researching the actual dirt of the Amazon.

CT: Mars’s surface material contains lots of iron oxide, which gives it its reddish color. The Amazon Basin soils — mostly Acrisol — also have an iron- and clay-rich subsoil, which gives the ceramics production from that region the characteristic terra-cotta color. Ironically, iron-rich soils are not fertile. We can’t grow food in Mars’s soil. Amazonian indigenous farming communities between 450 bce and 950 ce artificially fertilized their soil and developed terra preta, or black soil, which

at the level of the skin to draw out the relationships among material cultural production, affect, industry, consumer society, and our bodies. In consumer society, our clothes are considered a second skin, our cars a third, our houses a fourth, and so on. The skin is the limit between one’s own material integrity and the world — the point of contact with the outside.

One could argue that attachment to this differentiation or limit is what makes us believe that we are separated from the environment around us and, hence, what allows us to treat nature as the other and not as ourselves. In my new work, I’m interested in imagining the material remnants of our civilization, a postapocalyptic materiality, where references to nature, our bodies, and artificial materials are all connected.

mr: Butler’s female protagonists strike me as driven, smart, individualistic, and adaptive to extreme situations. When we have spoken of Butler’s feminism, you’ve used the term “ecofeminism.”

ct: I think Butler’s writings in general, and perhaps more specifically the Xenogenesis trilogy, are closely related to ecofeminist efforts to break with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, capitalist exploitation of natural resources and all other subordinate groups (i.e., women, people of color, children, the poor, indigenous peoples). The domination of nature is just one more version of the domination of others, enacted over and over by patriarchal, capitalist colonial forces. I love the figure of the Ooloi in Butler’s Xenogenesis — the Oankali’s third, undetermined sex — which, in my opinion, embodies some characteristics of an indigenous shaman, given its capacity to store in its body all the genetic information it acquires by ingesting samples from the natural world. Synthetic materials tend to make it sick. The Ooloi has the ability to heal others, correct humans’ genetic predisposition to disease, build offspring from their mates’ genetic material, and so on. It’s basically a being that lives out of and learns from trading with other species. It doesn’t get more ecofeminist than that!

Another interesting character in the books is the female protagonist, Lilith, who embodies some Amazon warrior features. She’s tough and resilient and gives birth to a new civilization of hybrid Oankali-humans to repopulate Earth starting in the Amazon forest.

The works for Future Fossil address consumer society’s footprint in Earth’s geological sedimentation as a wake-up call to an overdue collective behavioral change that acknowledges that humans are part of nature and that we need to work against the passivity surrounding this issue. Our current relationship to nature replicates the passive roles forced upon subordinate groups by patriarchal culture, politics, and capitalism.

MR: Your Radcliffe studio was full of piles of Amazon.com boxes, electronics scav-enged from Harvard’s waste programs, and packing material — the junk of our time. Your stacks looked like a localized recycling collection facility. Tell me more about the connection between waste and recycling in your artwork.

14 15

on exhibition Future Fossil (detail)

is the most fertile soil in the Amazon Basin. Terra preta is a product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture; the charcoal is stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding and retaining minerals and nutrients.

I’m interested in highlighting Mars’s iron-rich soil in the images used for the series #AmazonisPlanitia (after one of the smoothest plains on Mars), in contrast with the ingenuity of Amazonian indigenous farming communities and their fertile, ecologically artificial or anthropogenic soil.

MR: While many of your works are rooted in a materially specific physicality, you also use sound to create an immersive environment in this exhibition. Can you talk about your use of sound? What does it mean to have Siri — a form of artificial intelli-gence that uses advanced machine learning technologies — respond to humans, and to have Butler’s recorded voice from the past in conversation?

CT: Space travel has recently resurged in the collective imagination, perhaps because of the landing and transmissions from Mars Rovers, privately funded space trips like Mars One, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space venture. Like the obsession with the Moon in the 20th century, popular culture is producing films and web dramas about the first humans to visit Mars; the iPhone XR’s home screen pictures a planet that is not Earth; and a movie is out about astronaut Neil Armstrong’s life.

I believe that part of this space obsession comes from our anxiety about global warming’s potentially catastrophic outcomes on Earth, and the other part is just fear culture in play to justify the creation of an interplanetary industry that might eventually use public money and resources.

In You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone), the sound piece in the exhibition, I selected excerpts of interviews with Octavia Butler and put them in conversation with Siri. It’s very interesting to see how some of Butler’s state-ments about the future reflect our present. I will let her conclude our conversation with an excerpt taken from an interview recorded in 2000: “What I’ve noticed about the human species over my lifetime is that we tend to go over the edge, more often than we ought to. We go to the edge and then we realize ‘my God, that’s a precipice, we could fall over, we could die,’ and we draw back. The problem is, with something like global warming, you can’t just draw back and make it okay … after you spent over a century messing things up, by the time you decide to fix it, your grandchil-dren might see some results, but chances are, you won’t.”

Meg Rotzel is a curator and producer of exhibitions, artists’ projects, and public programs in the university context. She is the arts program manager at the Radcliffe Institute.

on exhibition #AmazonisPlanitia (detail)

18

AcknowledgmentsThe artist would like to thank Ben Durrell, Jennifer Roberts, Meg Rotzel, Morgan Spaulding, Rachel Vogel, and Joe Zane for their contributions to Future Fossil.The Radcliffe Institute would like to thank Rachel Vogel for editing this publication.

Arts at RadcliffeThe Radcliffe Institute promotes artist-led inquiry as a form of advanced study by initiating commissions and curatorial projects that reach across disciplines. Artists are invited to engage widely with the University and are provided access to research, intellectual communities, collections, and support for experimentation at Harvard.

radcliffe exhibition spaces

Johnson-Kulukundis Family Galleryhours: Noon – 5 pm, Monday – Saturday Byerly Hall, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Gardenhours: Open daily, dawn to dusk Radcliffe Yard, 77 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Gallery at the Schlesinger Library The Schlesinger Library is closed for renovation and will reopen in September 2019.Schlesinger Library, 3 James Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

onviewatradcliffe.org

Exhibitions at the Radcliffe Institute are free and open to the public.

© 2019, President and Fellows of Harvard College

outside covers: #AmazonisPlanitia (detail)inside covers: Spaceship Earth (detail)