clarissa tossin


Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion
July 1—October 31, 2021
La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mulhouse, France


In summer 2019, fires raged across the Amazon. Later that year and on through the Southern Hemisphere summer, more than 180,000 square kilometers burned in Australia. Early in 2020, the French National Forests Office reported that of the 9,343 forests it manages, 45.1% had been impacted by drought in 2019, particularly in Eastern France. Planet Earth is in a state of panic as a direct consequence of the industrialized, profit-driven, globally interconnected world created by humans. Our unwavering faith in progress has guided the industrial developments of the past three centuries. Today, as the world burns, we must rethink the course ahead. 

For Clarissa Tossin, there is no turning back, nor is the world we have wrought in the 21st century an acceptable foundation for the future. We are the products of consumer society, and the artist demonstrates this lineage while confronting us with the perverse absurdity of the world we are building and leaving to posterity. Through her sculptures, photographs, and installations, Tossin reflects on humans as the main agents in the global industrial complex—a system humans alone have brought about, for which humanity bears sole responsibility. We will leave our traces, the refuse of a civilization that has produced and consumed a great many artificial materials. Plastic and transformed metals will remain long after we are gone. Future archaeologists will judge our actions and methods. 

Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion

July 1 – October 31, 2021
La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mulhouse, France

Solo exhibition

 But Tossin is no judge. She looks forward, and what she sees today is not an end in itself but a crisis stage to be overcome. She is attentive to emerging solutions: many of us sort and recycle our waste and try to source our food locally. But these innovations are still in their infancy, inconsistently implemented and poorly enforced. From these real efforts and fictional responses to the global calamity, she imagines a day when we exhaust this planet and flee to Mars to begin a new history, as an extra-terrestrial civilization that has no choice but to continue elsewhere. In Circumnavigation Towards Exhaustion, Clarissa Tossin tackles issues which, like materials and ideas, circulate from one end of the world to the other, ultimately affecting every one of us, even in our daily lives.

– Sandrine Wymann


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