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, both contemporary and historical, and shaped by her lived experience as an ever-present immigrant navigating multiple geographies. Working across ritual, video, performance, installation, sound, sculpture, and mixed media, Toscano 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 Toscano, BONDING operates as a guiding methodology—material, ecological, energetic, and molecular—as a way of rebuilding and strengthening her relationship with nature. Through this, her work becomes a mechanism for healing loss, illuminating and dissecting her own lived experience of rupture, migration, and continuity, while opening space for other worlds. Influenced by thinkers from the global south such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Mignolo, and Davi Kopenawa, Toscano engages with decolonial and border thinking, mestiza consciousness, epistemodiversity, and ancestral cosmologies. She examines the coloniality of knowledge and the uprooting of beliefs, memories, and cultural extractions buried in the soil. Her practice connects experimental craft practices with speculative futures, exploring sonic memory, reconfigured territories, and new forms of offering.

Toscano often works with diasporic and discarded materials, selected for their conceptual resonance and geographical footprint. Through reconfiguration, her sculptural and installation work exposes the asymmetries of global circulation and the choreography of extraction and commodification. By reactivating materials deemed obsolete, she resists the logic of disposability and creates openings for reflection on consumption, value, and offering. Her practice embraces plant-thinking methodologies—even in relation to inanimate matter—and incorporates both offerings as material language and places of transit between the visible and invisible.