Clarissa Tossin

Clarissa Tossin’s work delves into the layered resonance of wind instruments and the excavation of cultural memory. In Before the Volcanoes Sing, she contends with Western architectural appropriation of Pre-Columbian roots, unraveling how such motifs have been displaced and recontextualized. The film undertakes a sensory journey across music and languages, following its Maya protagonists, K’iche’-Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez in Guatemala and Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal at the Sowden House in LA, at various architectural spaces real and imagined, cosmological and colonized.

The music was developed during an exploratory residency at EMPAC with Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães and Mexican flutist Alethia Lozano Birrueta, working with a selection of 3D scanned and printed terracotta replicas of ancient Maya wind instruments from Pre-Columbian collections held in US and Guatemalan museums. These instruments—imbued with histories of ritual, displacement, and colonial extraction—become active participants in the film, their sounds evoking the spiritual and ceremonial contexts they once inhabited. Some of the recreated flutes, made under the supervision of archeologist Jared Katz, are on display alongside the film, including one which resembles the Runik flute, the oldest ocarina found in Europe, held in Kosovo.

Tossin’s project demonstrates how these instruments, artifacts of profound cultural significance, can transcend their displacement and speak anew in contemporary contexts. Through her meticulous attention to sound and the tactile, ephemeral qualities of wind, Tossin reclaims an ancestral voice that resonates powerfully across time and space.