clarissa tossin


Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home

 November 2, 2024—February 2, 2025
Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, USA

Twenty-seven stars inside a blue orb adorn Brazil’s national flag, making it a veritable star atlas. Including nine constellations, each star represents a state of the republic, and one star stands in for the capital of Brasilia. Out of the constellations, the most recognizable is the Southern Cross, featured in the flag of Brazil with five stars. The cruzeiro, as the constellation is known in Portuguese, occupies a central place in the Brazilian imaginary—the cluster of stars is emblazoned on the passport; once the name of the country’s old currency, the cruzeiro is now displayed on every coin of the Brazilian real. For various Indigenous groups, this particular group of stars has been an important signifier in their cosmovision. Its ease of visibility, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, makes the Southern Cross a herald of the greatness that lies above us.

Conceptual artist Clarissa Tossin includes the star atlas found on the flag of Brazil, her home country, in one of the eighty-six flags that make up We are stardust (2024), an installation commissioned by Prospect.6. Inspired by American astronomer Carl Sagan’s quote, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself,” the title refers to scientists’ belief that most of the elements in our bodies were formed in stars over billions of years. It stands to reason, then, that humans would seek in galactic space an existential meaning of life that is key to understanding who we are here on Earth. Imagery associated with space is found in the origin stories, myths, religions, and national symbols of many different peoples. It is as if to understand ourselves we must look outside of us.



November 2, 2024—February 2, 2025
Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, USA
In Tossin’s We are stardust, the artist selected all the national flags bearing stars, the sun, and the moon in their original design, and erased all other graphic elements and colors, turning the background into a navy-blue night sky. Arranged into nine cascading rows of sheer, vertical flags, the installation reads as a unified constellation. The additive nature of her artwork emphasizes a shared cosmic origin—it resists jingoistic polarization and zealousness by reinforcing fundamental commonalities embedded in our makeup as humans. The work also proposes that, rather than speculating what resources will yield from space exploration, we should ask ourselves to think of our collective ancestry within the cosmos.

We are stardust continues Tossin’s investigation of the space race and, as the artist wonders, “whether the abuses of land and people that have marked our time on Earth get perpetuated as we move out into the solar system.” In other works such as A Queda do Céu (The Falling Sky) (2019), The 8th Continent (2021), and the series Future Geographies (2021-ongoing), also featured in Prospect.6, Tossin challenges the logic of greed and colonization inherent in the privatization of space exploration, the devastating effects of which are irreversibly evident on Earth.

— Marcela Guerrero

Prospect 6


November 2, 2024—February 2, 2025
Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, USA



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