clarissa tossin


Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia/Alberta, Michigan
January 16—April 26, 2015 
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA 

“In 1927, Henry Ford purchased a vast area in the interior of the state of Pará, situated in Brazil’s northern region, thanks to a series of tax exemptions obtained from the local government. Baptized Fordlândia—a name that suggests the measure of his gesture’s ambition—that territory would be used for the cheap extraction of latex from rubber trees, the raw material needed in the production of tires for Ford automobiles being manufactured in the United States. However, for multiple reasons, including barren earth, a lack of experience with local agricultural techniques, the workers’ inability to adapt to the region, and the imposition of inappropriate work habits brought from the company’s headquarters, the business failed. Another attempt was made in a more northerly area of the state and baptized Belterra. The soil there was more generous, and Ford began to profitably produce and export latex as of 1934, leading him to build cottages in the style of Cape Cod, common in America at the time, near the extraction site. 

In 1935, in a forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not so distant from Detroit, Henry Ford created a small town that he named Alberta, built around a sawmill. Made up of a dozen houses architecturally similar to those in Ford’s Belterra, as well as a school, and the pro- duction unit, the project was also associated with the intent to decentralize the automobile construction process, in particular the production of the model appropriately named the “Woodie Wagon,” which used considerable amounts of wood as raw material. In 1951, interruption of the production line of the Woodie Wagon led to the mill’s gradual shutdown. 

Clarissa Tossin structures her installation Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia/Alberta, Michigan around the two towns created by Henry Ford. Her artwork is not concerned with the detailed reconstitution of the history of each place, nor the didactic transmission of information about the economic and social dimensions of these projects. Instead, the work follows her investigations regarding concrete manifestations of the idea of modernity in various contexts. This research includes the untimely ruin of some of those buildings—not only in physical terms, but also in relation to the promises and convictions they contained and represented, which were also abandoned. To this end, she brings together and compares Belterra and Alberta many decades after they were disassociated from the international world of automobile production. She seeks out the similarities and differences between the two communities, specific locations that were inscribed within a movement that tied together such dissimilar global locations by means of a shared purpose and an entrepreneurial utopia. She uses images, she uses sounds, she uses empty and full spaces to create the sensation of a movement that existed and then exhausted itself within the very format in which it had been conceptualized. In seeking out and recording the traces of each place, she evokes a time which no longer exists, contributing to an archaeology of the modern—an archaeology that does not look for transparency in its findings, but recognizes and assumes that the subject of its investigation is opaque. 

The installation’s central elements are two projections, one on each side of a wall placed in the middle of the exhibition space. On one side of the wall, moving images of Belterra are projected; on the other side, moving images of Alberta. Clarissa Tossin recorded both situations in our time, a time when Belterra and Alberta no longer operate according to the logic of their original conception. Nevertheless, these places bear the marks of their shared past. The images on view cannot be seen simultaneously: one can only view the two projected films alternately. Therefore, comparison between them is mediated by the viewer’s memory of watching first one, and then the other, narrative. What they recollect reveals resemblances between the ways each town is presented. There is an immediate similarity between the highlighted subjects: the careful examination of the wooden dwellings—in wide shots and in telling details; the search for traces of the original functions of the places; the movement of people and cars in the few streets; the life being lived by their current inhabitants, seen at work and at play; and the relaxed meeting-places that are provided by the benches, set in front of nearly all the houses in Belterra. 

Streamlined:
Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan

January 16 – April 26, 2015
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA

There is also the equivalence of the visual syntax used to capture and order the images of Belterra and of Alberta, duplicating and synchronizing camera framings and movements of each location, thus evoking the idea of an assembly line that was so dear to Henry Ford. However, this strategy of duplication and synchronization does not create commodities, on the contrary, what we see are similar images that in turn produce a mirroring effect between distinct and distant places, in the memory of those who see them projected separately. Replicas of a couple of Belterra’s wooden benches, seen in the filmed scenes, have been placed before each side of the wall, for exhibition visitors to sit and watch the work. Situated on these benches, viewers also become integrated into the created landscape, so that they may become part of the assembly line devised by the artist to join the Amazon and Michigan, albeit with an eloquent wall between them.

Whereas the filmed images of Belterra and Alberta may only be seen by physically moving to another place in the exhibition space, the sounds from both of the filmed environments mix and bring together what is distant and divided. Almost as if the physical and human geography of those two very diverse territories—their vegetation, their climate, the skin colors of those who inhabit them, the way their bodies move through space—are confounded by means of the noises that fuse within the room. In particular, an extended factory whistle is heard to blow every so often—a recollection of the time in which the workers of Belterra were not only awakened by that sound summons, but also had the beginning and the end of the principal stages of their work marked by it. It is the sound of “Fordism” entering and striving to control the forest, which now signals the students’ arrival and departure in the town school. This sound, also heard while observing images of Alberta, alludes to Henry Ford’s desire to transport a way of regulating workers’ bodies in the factory, from his country to any location in the world, making those bodies more and more submissive for the purpose of efficient automobile production. 

Thus formalized, Clarissa Tossin’s installation seeks to excavate evidence of a form of work and life that remains from a past that was once modern, and that currently belongs only to the time of now. The artist acts as an “interpreter” of what remains of these two towns in- vented by Henry Ford—slowly transformed ever since their creation, discarding or incorporating things and meanings—to offer her own interpretation of those changes, through images, for public debate. Thus, her practice belongs to the order of the “forensic aesthetic” proposed by architect Eyal Weizman as “the mode of appearance of things in forums—the gestures, techniques, and technologies of demonstration; methods of theatricality, narrative, and dramatization; image enhancement and technologies of projection; the creation and demolition of reputation, credibility, and competence”. In the architecture of those places, Clarissa Tossin’s work seeks out traces of a way of life that no longer dominates the order of things, a way of life that nevertheless contributes to our understanding of where we have been and where we are now. 


— Moacir dos Anjos


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