clarissa tossin: future fossil

On an earth ravaged by war, with humanity gasping for its last breaths, an alien species called the Oankali rescues the shattered remains of the planet and its inhabitants. Stripped of its interstellar creatures, however, Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rights, 1988; and Imago, 1989) is fundamentally a story of humanity’s stubborn insistence that the human race ought to continue on, despite its inevitable self-destruction. Such a bleak conclusion rings all too true in light of the 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which unequivocally warns that our own actions are causing irreversible and irreparable damage to the planet. Our ability to survive on Earth will be compromised unless unprecedented, large-scale coordinated action is immediately taken.

Clarissa Tossin’s exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute, Future Fossil, uses Butler’s trilogy as a starting point for her own speculation on the future — the material traces that serve as the Anthropocene’s calling card after its self-induced ecological apocalypse. This fictional world to come holds open a space to reimagine our present. The Oankali’s relationship to their environment is one of complete symbiosis: everything (including their spaceships, homes, and transport vehicles)

is considered a living being that must be cared for. In this exhibition, the Brazilianborn artist juxtaposes our current extractivist approach to Earth’s natural resources with indigenous understandings of human beings as part of nature. How might we rewrite the end of our own story by conceptualizing the world as an integrated assemblage that includes people, nature, and the built environment?