OBSCURA LUZ: curated by Kiki Mazzucchelli

'Maiolino’s exploring of paper and clay and their corporeity situates the work very close to Neo-Concrete practices, giving greater attention to the process of constructing than to what is constructed. Although her interest is similarly directed towards both the immediacy of the operation and the inevitable bodily connotation, she also tries to dissolve oppositions between subject and object, artist and spectator, nature and culture. Equally important as the exterior space is what Clark describes as “the feeling of a deep space inside ourselves”—the relation of a real outside space to an imaginary interior one. It is within the trivial tasks in every home that Maiolino finds a way to draw forth her moulded earthen work and to connect the subject with our primitive memory'.

'During the 1990s, as the banal evidence of the doing hand in daily life moulds the clay, the working process itself seems to bifurcate, taking Maiolino’s sculpture along two parallel paths. One leads to works that find their final shapes in the arrest of the casting procedure at the second phase in the execution of the mould. The work is the retrieved negative itself in The Shadow of the Other no. I series (1993), The Absentees (1993–1996), It’s What’s Missing series (1995–2001), and In & Out series (1995). As Maiolino describes, “The titles of these works refer to the existence of the opposite, the absent positive that has been separated from the negative. They form only one body at a given moment during the process of making the moulded sculpture. Thus, the process of those works incorporates the nostalgia for the matrix.” The mould, usually forgotten and discarded, she continues, “is endowed with new value by the emphasis given to its generative properties, to the vacant space, in which the memory of the other exists in its not being there: the positive-present in absence.”'

Catherine de Zegher (Maiolino’s Earthen Work or Enfooded Art)

On my first visit to Tossin’s studio, in early 2009, I encountered five  resinous, amber-hued globules. Titled Portuguese Vowels (2008), the  peculiar “organic” shapes, all of a size to hold in one’s hand, are not as amorphous as they first seem, but incredibly specific. Cast in sugar, the artist’s mouth served as mold, with the shape of the five molds determined by the pronunciation of each of the five major vowels, in Portuguese, mouth held in place as the mold set:2 A…   E…    I…     O…     U… I should have recognized the forms sooner: As a child, I had similar casts of my mouth made by my orthodontist, albeit in plaster rather than sugar. The choice in material is hardly arbitrary. Sugar, like the Portuguese  language, represents a colonial history: Production of the crop structured the landscape, the economy, and the movement of bodies, as sugar  became Brazil’s largest export good from the 16th century into the 18th century. The growing popularity of sugar in Europe fueled factory workers  and the industrial revolution there as well as the increased importation of slaves from Africa into Brazil—a vicious cycle that ensured Portugal’s  control over the colonial territory. There is some art historical material to account for here, too. See, for example, Nauman’s sculptures cast from body parts (e.g., the self-explanatory Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists, 1966), as well as his facial manipulations (Both Lips Turned Out / Mouth Open / Upper Lip Pushed…, a drawing from 1967) and his punning photograph Eating My Words (1966–67/1970). Hannah Wilke’s chewing gum sculptures (as in S.O.S.—Starification Object Series, 1975), similarly  playful, and decidedly sexual, also come to mind. And before them there is Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959), a plaster cast of the inside of the artist’s cheek mounted on a drawing of his profile. One can assume these references are also assumed—consumed— by the artist. Regardless, it’s amusing to imagine the process of casting candy vowels with the mouth, speaking of multitasking. How long did she hold each position—each note? What is the sound of a vowel cast in sugar? Did she drool while making them? Here, the body serves as a medium, a vehicle. The French noun véhicule is derived from the verb vehere, to carry, originating in the Latin vehiculum—carriage, conveyance. The body, mobilized, is a vehicle. The body conveys. It speaks; it sings. (And it occasionally drools: It exceeds; it loses control.) As a vehicle, it carries history, meaning—as an agent of  consumption, an agent of translation (e.g., from sound to sculpture),  an agent of transaction (from verb to noun).

(Text: Michael Ned Nolte, 2015)