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Clarissa Tossin: Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan

May 3–August 3, 2024
Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall
Guest curator: Noa Bronstein

Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan, by Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, pairs scenes of nearly identical Ford Motor Company towns, located in different parts of the world. The left side of Tossin’s video moves across Belterra, a rubber-plantation village in the Amazon forest, while the right shows Alberta, a sawmill town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Both were built in 1935, to produce rubber and wood for mass manufacture of Ford’s Model T in the United States. Depicting the two towns in parallel, the video focuses in and out on residential buildings, tree harvests, moments of daily life, and natural landscapes. Articulating the tensions between authenticity and simulacrum that inform these planned communities, Tossin’s mirroring both establishes and unsettles a sense of space and place, across disparate but deeply linked geographies. Ultimately, Streamlined offers a subtle inquiry into the history of globalized production and its material and social residues.  

Fig. 1

Clarissa Tossin, Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (still), 2013, two-channel video. Courtesy of the artist 

Fig. 2

Clarissa Tossin, Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (still), 2013, two-channel video. Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 3

Clarissa Tossin, Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (still), 2013, two-channel video. Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 4

Clarissa Tossin, Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan (still), 2013, two-channel video. Courtesy of the artist

Artist Bio

Clarissa Tossin

Clarissa Tossin (Brazil, b. 1973) is a visual artist who uses moving images, installation, sculpture, and collaborative research to engage the suppressed counternarratives implicit in both the built and natural environments of extractive economies. She has had solo exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado (2022); and La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021). She has also participated in the 14th Shanghai Biennial (2023); the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023); and the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020). Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Fundação Inhotim, Brazil.