The Body Weight of Passports

Maria Helena Toscano is a Venezuelan/Colombian artist based between London and Berlin. As a South American immigrant, she challenges existing models and notions of identity, citizenship, borders, and belonging. Her work is influenced by the theoretical frameworks of Latin American authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter D. Mignolo, particularly in the realms of decolonial and border thinking, as well as Mestiza consciousness. Using various mediums such as video, performance, installation, sound, sculpture, text, and mixed media, her work examines the impact of extractivism, the uprooting of beliefs and knowledge, migration, and displacement. She highlights the interconnectedness of people and cultures, seeking to illuminate, understand, and dissect the contemporary Latina experience and its roots. With a strong spiritual dimension, a significant aspect of her practice involves utilising art as a healing mechanism. Her projects emphasise experimental processes that are activated and deeply influenced by her surroundings and the contrasts between city, nature, our bodies, and histories. She likes to start a project with discarded materials, relating them to a concept or idea, while also allowing intuition and emotion to guide the process. Her work often features materials chosen for their conceptual significance, such as banknotes, passports, tree roots, or ashes, embracing non-traditional elements where ongoing processes continue to shape them.