Tossin’s series of drawings on Amazon delivery envelopes explore how mapping and naming serve as technologies for colonial visions of “discovery.” In Maritime Arrivals, Tossin draws and names sites from the Moon in the style of fifteenth-century nautical maps, or portolan charts. She identifies craters—labeled mare, Latin for “sea,” by early astronomers who mistook them for actual bodies of water—alongside landing sites of twentieth-century American and Russian lunar missions, including the Apollo and Luna programs. Longtime navigational symbols such as rhumb lines and scale bars intersect with their contemporary counterparts, barcodes and QR codes. In her collapsing of time and space, Tossin considers the ways current technologies continue to facilitate conquest.
Maritime Arrivals, 2023
archival ink on used Amazon.com delivery envelopes
23 ¾ x 61 ¾ in.