Maria Helena Toscano — multidisciplinary artist

“I believe we are bodies shaped by extraction, yet still held by an unseen bond with the natural world, and my work seeks to restore that connection.”

Maria Helena Toscano is a Venezuelan-Colombian multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and designer whose practice is rooted in the ecological and political contexts of Latin America and shaped by her lived experience as an immigrant navigating multiple geographies.

Working across ritual, video, performance, installation, sound, sculpture, and mixed media, Maria Helena investigates extractivism, migration, displacement, and cognitive justice. Her projects emphasize experimental processes activated by sound and informed by research, metaphor, and her immediate surroundings. She engages with the contrasts between urban landscapes, nature, bodies, and histories, treating color, echo, and rhythm as active fields of memory and transformation.

For Maria Helena, BONDING operates as a guiding methodology—material, ecological, energetic, and molecular—as a way of rebuilding and strengthening her relationship with the living world, drawing on decolonial and border thinking, mestiza consciousness, epistemodiversity, and ancestral cosmologies.

Often working with diasporic and discarded materials, Maria Helena reconfigures what has been deemed obsolete, exposing the asymmetries of global circulation while resisting the logic of disposability. Her practice embraces plant-thinking methodologies—even in relation to inanimate matter—and incorporates both offerings as material language and sites of transit between the visible and invisible.

https://mhtoscano.com/
https://www.instagram.com/m.h.toscano/

Photography: Christian Braga by Labverde

Funding

Through the venturenauten community, Maria Helena received:

Financial funding that has been critical to the development of Maria Helena’s artistic vision
Mentoring from Christian Rosche & Franka Ismer
Valuable network connections

Venturenauten provided financial support for Maria Helena’s project “Sonic Offering: Forest Echoes — Transmissions”, enabling research and fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

Next Steps

Further development of Sonic Offering: Forest Echoes — Transmissions into site-responsive installations and ongoing work and research in institutional and public contexts.
Workshops, talks, and shared research outputs that expand engagement with ecological listening methodologies and speculative ecological practices.

Her project is a sound-based ecological research and artistic offering that approaches the Amazon as a sentient ecological system and investigates sound as a medium for cross-species and cross-temporal communication. The project aims to counter extractivist logics by proposing practices of return, care, and reciprocity through sound and ritual-based methodologies.

During the research phase, Maria Helena collected recordings of endangered and displaced species and reintroduced these sonic materials into forest environments as part of a speculative ecological sound ritual. These recordings were played through a sculptural container designed to function both as a transmitter and as an offering, with its form informed by natural structures and observed practices of giving within the forest ecosystem.

In parallel, the recordings were integrated into a live modular synthesis system incorporating a bioelectrical interface that translates plant electrical activity into sound modulation. This setup allowed real-time interaction between plant signals and the sonic material, enabling the environment to actively influence and transform the sound output. The modular system operates through interconnected patch connections that carry electrical signals between sound sources, plant interfaces, and processing modules.

The project is grounded in ancestral cosmologies and speculative ecological theory and adopts an acoustemological approach, understanding sound as a method of knowledge production and ecological relationship. Through this process, the project articulated Sonic Offering as a situated artistic-research methodology grounded in ritual–technological attunement and more-than-human sonic correspondence. The research outcomes will inform future installations, performances, and publications related to the Forest Echoes project.