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.

Maria Helena Toscano
(b. 1987) Colombia
Lives and works in London and Berlin

Education

2025    Modular Synthesis for Live Performance and Composition, Berlin School of Sound, Berlin, DE
2024    MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2023    Graduate Diploma in Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2012     MA Media and Audiovisual Production, Aalborg University Esbjerg & Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe DK/DE
2007    BA Communication Design, Instituto de Diseño de Caracas, Caracas, VE

Exhibitions

2026    Soft Mechanics, FILET London, London, UK
2025    14th Art Auction, Weserhalle, Berlin, DE
2025    THE SIGNAL. THE NOISE, Greatorex Street, London, UK
2025    Uprooted: Ghosts & the Bleaching of Roots, Ventana Project, U8 Gesundbrunnen, Berlin, DE
2025    Ambient Fields, The Goodroom, Berlin, DE
2025    OUTBOUND, Galeria Objects, London, UK
2024    ONE EXTENDED MEDITATION, Copeland Gallery, London, UK
2024    RIPPLES, Hypha studios, Sugar House Island, London, UK
2024    Contemporary Art Practice MA Graduation Show, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2024    Occult Surge, Moosey Gallery Hoxton, London, UK
2024    Traveling Memories, The Modern Showroom Shoreditch, London, UK
2024    William Blake and Conflict: Beyond Borders and Forms, Queen’s College, Cambridge, UK
2024    The Regenerative Power of War in the Arts, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
2024    The CAPiverse: Towards Levitation, TATE Modern, London, UK
2024    Welcome to the UK, Ugly Duck, London, UK
2024    Rites & Rituals, Safehouse 1, Peckham, London, UK
2023    Prophecy of Future Extinctions, CAP Space Gallery, RCA Battersea, London, UK
2023    ACROSS & OVER. Royal College of Art, HSBC HQ, Canary Wharf, London, UK
2023    Perspectives on Queer Hedonism, Club Silly, Brixton, London, UK
2023    Last Night Collective Vol 1: Quintesenti, W1 Curates Studios, London, UK
2023    Exhibition Poor.img. Royal College of Art, The MediaWorks, London, UK
2021     Co-Curation. Die Hasen Stunde, White Rectangle [] Berlin, DE

Selected Performances

2025    Carbon Bonds & Fishing Spirits at the Crater, GeoPark, Nysiros, GR
2025    Activation at Uprooted: Ghosts & the Bleaching of Roots, Ventana Project, U8 Gesundbrunnen, Berlin, DE
2024    Sound intervention at Murmurings of No-Man’s Land installation, Copeland Gallery, London, UK
2024    Cacerolazo Aunar, Copeland Gallery, London, UK
2024    The Shell & The Root II, Hypha studios, Sugar House Island, London, UK
2024    The Shell & The Root I, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2024    Welcome to the UK, Ugly Duck, London, UK
2022    The Body Weight of Passports, Site-specific, Brike Lane, London, UK
2021    GLASS Speaks in five (5) different tongues, White Rectangle [] Berlin, DE

Residencies & Reserach Programmes

2026    Upcoming - Listening Futures, The Listening Academy, Berlin, DE
2025    Speculative Ecologies, LabVerde, Amazon, BR

Awards / Grants

2026    Supported by Venturenauten
2025    Supported by Venturenauten
2024    Eaton Trust Fund Grant
2023    Royal College of Art. Study Costs Bursary Scholarship
2022    Winner in Latin American Design Awards
2019     Winner in Latin American Design Awards
2018     Nominated in awwwards

Curatorial Projects & Artist Talks

2026    Upcoming - Regimes of Appearence: Still Becoming, Bomb Factory, London, UK
2024    Artist talk at ONE EXTENDED MEDITATION, Copeland Gallery, London, UK
2024    RIPPLES, Hypha studios, Sugar House Island, London, UK
2024    Artist talk at The Regenerative Power of War in the Arts, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
2021    Die Hasen Stunde, White Rectangle [] Berlin, DE

Publications

2026    Upcoming - Speculative Ecologies, LabVerde, Amazon, BR
2023    Published in RCA X HSBC Across & Over Exhibition
2023    Published in Sampler 87 Royal College of Art
2023    Published in Posters can help, Slanted Publishers
2022    Sole Authorship: GLASS Speaks in five (5) different tongues
2021     Sole Authorship: Wet Paper Smells After Two (2) Days
2021     Co-authorship: Die Hasen Stunde Nr.01 (The Hour of the Hare)
2019     Published in Visual Harmony, Send Points publishing house

Featured

2019    Featured in Behance, Motion Served
2017    Featured in Idn World

Selected Professional Experience

2019-    Iconic Consulting Ltd, Creative Partner, Creative Director & Concept Developer, London, UK
2019-    ST. Oberholz Consulting GmbH, Brand Activist, Creative Direction and Spatial Visual Systems, Berlin, DE
2016     Scholz & Friends GmbH, Art Director; Motion graphics & Concept Developer, Berlin, DE
2015     BLITZEN GmbH, Art Director; Motion graphics & Audiovisual Production, Berlin, DE
2012     Iconic Consulting GmbH, Graphic Designer & Motion Graphics, Berlin, DE