Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1973 in Porto Alegre, Brazil
Lives in Los Angeles, CA

Clarissa Tossin’s film appears alongside 3D-printed replicas of pre-Columbian Maya wind instruments. Tossin had the replicas made so that they could be played in the film, which traces the movement of Maya people and culture across multiple spaces and temporalities, real and imagined, cosmological and colonized. The fact that the ancient instruments are not available for use—isolated from their original context and kept behind glass in museum collections—can be seen as a distillation of the themes of dislocation and tradition that Tossin works to reconcile in the film.

Featuring the K’iche ’Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez and the Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, the film looks at ways in which contemporary Maya culture is activated by means of both reclamation and re-creation. Tossin filmed some parts in Guatemala and others at the John Sowden House in Los Angeles, built by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. in the “Mayan Revival” style, which used pre-Columbian Mesoamerican motifs without significant reference to or engagement with their sources.