Clarissa Tossin’s MCA Denver solo museum exhibition presents recent and newly commissioned artworks that explore the causes and effects of rising temperatures on Earth and humankind’s rapidly evolving aspirations to explore territories on the Moon and Mars. Looking at our climate crisis through the lens of twenty-first-century Space exploration, Tossin draws connections between signs of environmental distress on our planet and the projected future of the Earth’s outer atmosphere and beyond. 

Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1973, Tossin has for more than a decade grappled with the geopolitical causes of climate change and the legacies of colonialism through her research-based practice and choice of sculptural materials such as Amazonian-native latex, synthetic rubber (silicone), recycled plastic, repurposed cardboard from Amazon delivery boxes and meteorite powder. For her MCA Denver presentation, Tossin compares histories of resource extraction on Earth with plans already in development by the United States government and private companies for future resource extraction on the Moon, which is projected to facilitate the colonization of Mars. 

As the Space surrounding our planet becomes increasingly militarized, monetized, and filled by both functional and defunct orbiting objects, Tossin’s practice provides an invaluable window into understanding humanity’s approach to Space and how it will affect future generations. At a 2021 aerospace industry conference in Colorado, the NASA keynote address referred to Space (also known as ​“the High Frontier”), as ​“competitive, contested, and congested.” Tossin’s exhibition targets the major economic, political, and surveillance issues at stake in what current-day aerospace industry specialists are referring to as ​“the second golden age of space exploration.”

Clarissa Tossin’s concerns with the ramifications of the commercialization of Space is highlighted in the tryptic of jacquard tapestries entitled The 8^th Continent, 2021. These large-scale tapestries repurpose images of the Moon taken by NASA to identify the locations of substantial ice deposits, articulated in these tapestries through glittering metallic gold thread. These ice deposits have the potential to be mined and used in the production of hydrogen rocket fuel in service of NASA’s planned Artemis mission to Mars. Tossin employs the grandeur of tapestries, a medium used since the medieval and Renaissance period to convey power and wealth, to articulate how NASA and private companies’ intent to instrumentalize the Moon, emulates centuries-long patterns of land extraction and colonization on Earth.

Her 2021 Future Geography weaving series combines strips of Amazon delivery boxes with NASA satellite images of the Shackleton Crater (the proposed site of the first US lunar ice mining facility), the Jezero Crater on Mars (where NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in 2021), and the Hyades Star Cluster, (one of the closest clusters of stars to our Sun), further drawing attention to private sector’s interest and investment in Space exploration. The suspended, double-sided circular weavings in A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky), 2019 interlace satellite views of the 2019 fires in Amazônia and the Amazon River, along with NASA images from the Martian plain Amazonis Planitia, and the Milky Way in woven patterns resembling the geometric partitioning of land by agribusiness when viewed from space.