RojoNegro - La asamblea del barro

ROJONEGRO: María Sosa and Noé Martínez

RojoNegro is an artistic duo composed of María Sosa and Noé Martínez, based in Mexico City. Their collaborative practice explores the body, memory, territory, dreams, and ritual as spaces of knowledge and as a means of disrupting the homogenizing gaze. Their work challenges the limits of Western knowledge in relation to the Ecology of Knowledges, with the aim of exploring and approaching, from other perspectives, the body and the maladies of the contemporary world.

Notable among their recent projects are Invisible Acts to Sustain the Universe, presented at the Mexican Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, Venice (Italy); The Fragments That Heal, No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam (Netherlands); I Became a Vessel Again, It Became an Animal Again, a Plant Again, It Became Time Again, Zapopan Art Museum, Zapopan (Mexico), 2024; Tepalcates of Dreams, commissioned by the Swiss Institute, Mexico City (Mexico), 2022; and The Meeting of the Tepalcates, commissioned by the Swiss Institute, New York (United States), 2021.

La Asamblea del Barro by artist collective RojoNegro brings together 260 ceramic signs that evoke both the continuity and transformation of the knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Gathered through archaeological, ethnographic, oral-historical, and fieldwork research, these images function as fragments of collective memory, forming a visual and material archive that connects past and present ways of knowing.

As a compendium of sensitive stimuli, the ceramic forms invite viewers to engage embodied knowledge and everyday experience through what the artists understand as an integral body-archive. Materialized as clay bodies, the figures establish a cognitive and sensory dialogue between the viewer, the environment, and the site itself. The Triton Administrative Services Building, completed in 2026, serves as a welcoming campus gateway designed to support learning, connection, and global exploration. Installed on the building’s terrace and overlooking the main pedestrian corridor, La Asamblea del Barro brings forms of thought rooted in the territory of present-day Mexico into conversation with Western knowledge systems, generating a plurality of perspectives that span philosophy, art, cultural practices, and the exact sciences.

RojoNegro’s practice emphasizes a sensitive understanding of materials as living presences, carriers of knowledge that have endured processes of coloniality since the sixteenth century in the Americas. The selection of 260 images, significant within the lunar ritual calendar, reflects both personal decolonizing experiences and broader social struggles in which original knowledge continues to gain relevance. Drawing on Mesoamerican conceptions of the body, clay is understood as flesh: a vessel that carries memory and knowledge. The colors, sourced from diverse ecosystems, reinforce a deep relationship with territory and foreground Indigenous practices of care, protection, and ecological stewardship.