Fordlândia Fieldwork

2012 - Installation (Installation)

Clarissa Tossin

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

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. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape. These topographical maps present different locations related to Fordlândia’s history: a current Fordlândia satellite image of the abandoned rubber plantation built by Ford in 1928, juxtaposed with postindustrial landscapes from Detroit, Dallas, and Los Angeles, is printed on the back side of the folded mapsculpture.


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:



Related works featuring themes of: » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Installation Art, » Brazil, » Globalization, » Color Photography, » Cross-Cultural Dialogue, » Brazilian

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...

The White Album
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2008

The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...

La Ligne du Temps
© » KADIST

Valeska Soares

2012

Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...

Nothing New
© » KADIST

Oded Hirsch

2012

Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...

Two Eyes Two Mouth
© » KADIST

Erika Verzutti

2015

Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ...

Untitled (TIME)
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2010

In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...

Impossible Accomplishment or the power as addition of seductions 2
© » KADIST

Marcelo Cidade

2006

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...

West (Flag 1) (Flag 3) (Flag 6)
© » KADIST

Alexandre da Cunha

2011

The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Fernanda Gomes

2013

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...

The Book Cover series
© » KADIST

Heman Chong

2009

With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...

War Footage
© » KADIST

Mauricio Ancalmo

2010

War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...

Re: definition of architectural project 2
© » KADIST

Marcelo Cidade

2006

Marcelo Cidade interrogates the city, architecture and urban planning...

Good Life
© » KADIST

Danh Vo

2007

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo...

Collectors’ Favorites
© » KADIST

Jennifer Bornstein

1994

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...

20 Surrogates
© » KADIST

Allan McCollum

1982

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Automóvel
© » KADIST

Cinthia Marcelle

2012

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...