[1] Her collaborative, research-based practice develops alternative narratives found in the built environment, using elements of installation, sculpture, and moving image to explore intersections of place, history, and aesthetics.
She attended college in São Paulo at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), then moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to pursue graduate study at CalArts, receiving her MFA in 2009.
Through videos, sculptures, photographs, and ephemera, including a 1973 Volkswagen Brasília loaded with pool-cleaning equipment, the work brings out the cities' shared architecture, swimming pools, and car culture, as well as their convergent histories of urbanization alongside the burgeoning auto industry and highway infrastructure, elaborating their paradoxically utopian and dystopic place in the global imagination.
According to curator Sandrine Wymann, "Tossin contemplates the day, not far off, when we exhaust this planet's resources and flee to Mars to begin anew, as an extra-terrestrial civilization with no choice but to continue elsewhere or perish.
Tossin exposes this mimicry with skin-like silicone imprints of the reliefs that decorate the theater's doors and walls, combined with plaster casts of hands and feet sourced from the archeological sites, and bits of faux jaguar fur, quetzal feather, and serpent skin.
[18][19][20][21] Tossin's collaborative film Mojo'q che b'ixan ri ixkanulab' / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing (2022) presents an immersive sensory journey across languages, music, and architectural spaces that are variously imagined and real, cosmological and colonized.
Commissioned by EMPAC, the work centers on 3D printed playable replicas of ancient Maya musical instruments, 3D scanned and modeled by archaeologist and curator Jared Katz, exploring their capacity to voice alternative modes of knowledge.
[22][23][24] As art historian Susanna Phillips Newbury observes: "Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as in her 2017 video Ch'u Mayaa, or more broadly examining a grotesque, postlapsarian world, [Tossin] employs the future perfect language of speculative science to propose ways of seeing our devastated present.