Chu’u Mayaa

2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

17:57 minutes

Clarissa Tossin

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1973
gender: female
nationality: Brazilian
home town: Porto Alegre, Brazil

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture. By re-appropriating the structure as a temple and imbuing it with a dance performance based on movements and postures found in ancient pottery and murals, the choreography takes its influence from the house’s design and the body positions on ancient Maya ceramics and buildings. A pulse, breathing, and a pre-Columbian clay flute are among the sounds on the soundtrack. Tossin mimics how the Maya civilization might have used a temple or ceremonial structure by employing Hollyhock House as a stage. The home is re-signified as belonging to the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture lineage by the movement of a female dancer. The title, which translates as Maya Blue , refers to the ancient azure color seen on Mayan ceramics and paintings portraying dancers, which is widely renowned for its weather resistance and ability to withstand the passage of time.


Clarissa Tossin’s photographs, videos, and installations are active investigations into the workings of urban planning and labor politics. The artist draws poignant parallels among historical events, creating engaging narratives that are also often subversive. Many of her works are concerned with what could be called a topography of place. Focusing on the promises, legacies, and failings of modernity, globalism, and utopian idealism, much of her work concentrates on cultural and economic connections between the United States and Latin American countries. Tossin’s most recent artwork, Archaeology of the Present, investigates the link between Indigenous civilizations and current Los Angeles via the lenses of gender and appropriation.


Colors:



On Fire
© » KADIST

Runo Lagomarsino

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Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke)
© » KADIST

Runo Lagomarsino

2020

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Sal Sem Carne
© » KADIST

Cildo Meireles

1975

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© » KADIST

Rivane Neuenschwander

2007

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Clarissa Tossin

2012

In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...

On Fire
© » KADIST

Runo Lagomarsino

2020

On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...

Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke)
© » KADIST

Runo Lagomarsino

2020

Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...

Untitled (TIME)
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2010

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Fordlândia Fieldwork
© » KADIST

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2012

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