The artwork, created together by María Sosa and Noé Martínez, a Mexico-based artist collective known as RojoNegro, has drawn special attention from art lovers and received critical acclaim at the Venice Biennale. ‘Actos invisibles para sostener el universo’ is considered both the sounds echoing through Mexican worlds and self-defence, while also offering a respite from present-day noise. In a ritual period that blends decolonial viewpoints, relational ecologies, and indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and rural cosmogonies, this installation is envisioned as an invocation that triggers ancestral memory and diverse forms of intelligence through contemplation.
From a decolonial standpoint, RojoNegro Art Collective blends ritual technology, embodied languages, and ancestral memory. Their work highlights local forms of knowledge that challenge colonisation processes and their ongoing effects on bodies, territories, and contemporary worldviews through installations, performances, sound, and organic materials.
Their projects have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. In 2024, they presented Volví a ser vasija, volví a ser animal. Volví a ser planta, volví a ser tiempo en MAZ (Museo de Arte de Zapopan), Jalisco. In 2022, they carried out Tepalcates de sueños, an OFFSITE intervention by the Swiss Institute in collaboration with Seminario 12 in Mexico City. Recent group exhibitions include Cordillera at Extra Galería (Guatemala), The Cape Town Art Fair with No Mans Gallery (South Africa), and Resilient Currents: On Communal Re-Existence at Forma (Paris, France), all in 2024. In 2023, they participated in Éramos semillas at Stove Works (USA) and Las estrellas me iluminan al revés at No Man’s Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands).
As part of the interview series, a conversation with Venice Biennale artists, Abirpothi, featuring Mexico-based artist collective, RojoNegro. The artist discusses in detail their work and their presence in the Venice Biennale.
Q: Actos invisibles para sostener el universo creates a space of contemplation and ritual within the Venice Biennale. How did you approach translating intimate ancestral practices into the context of a large international exhibition without losing their spiritual and political depth?
RojoNegro: In the practices of our communities, there are two types of ritual, one in the private sphere and another in the public sphere, both dealing with the spiritual and political; in the private sphere, the spiritual connection is more important, while in the public sphere, the political work is what matters, although both involve aspects of each.
For us, the work of producing and presenting the pavilion functioned along these same dimensions. For example, in the private sphere, we produced the videoperformances as an offering of physical effort and sweat, aiming to establish communication with the entities represented by the archaeological pieces whose postures we embodied. This intimate process gave rise not only to the videoperformance presented in the pavilion but also to a series of poems inscribed on the vessels, whose full reading is inaccessible to the viewer, though their presence is not.
In general, the production of the pavilion arose from multiple private acts where we sought to “work” with the combination of our energies, the entities, history, and matter itself in order to carry out the public political act of its presentation, where all the works are arranged to work with the energy of the viewers who are willing to open their mind and heart to dialogue.
Q: Your work often speaks about invisible systems of connection between bodies, territories, memory, and the cosmos. In today’s hyper-visible and hyper-digital world, why is “the invisible” politically important for you?
RojoNegro: Digital imagery or contemporary visibility often only creates an appearance and does not provide a way to access the depth of ideas or issues. The overproduction of images also distorts experience and makes human contact more distant. In our practice, we try to get closer to the essence of things. In the context of art, invisibility is not about disappearing, but about creating a balance between constant visual stimulation and the experience of reflection and empathy that can be guided by an image. We aim to create presences, not just appearances, to create concepts, not just visual stimuli. Talking about concepts and presences is reflecting on relationships between people, and relationships require pauses.
Q: The Mexico Pavilion engages indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and rural cosmogonies as living systems of thought rather than historical references. How do you resist the institutional tendency to exoticise or historicise Indigenous knowledge within global art spaces?
RojoNegro: Exoticization is a very complex topic, a product of the epistemic and aesthetic colonisation of the West. From our point of view, exoticization is not a problem with the pieces—it’s a problem with the person who looks at them. That is, exoticization involves two parts: a gaze and an object/person that seems eccentric to that gaze. This puts the gaze as a starting point, as the centre, as what is “normal” or “universal,” assuming that only Western epistemes and aesthetics are normal or universal.
We are generally asked this question, and within our communities of non-Western artists, this concern also circulates as a claim and a fear. But it’s interesting to see that we don’t find this to be true of artists in the Western canon. Why? When Western art could be just as exotic to people who don’t share the exact reading keys, where what’s presented is considered “common.” What exposes exoticization as one of the methods that returns to the pursuit of aesthetic, and therefore symbolic and epistemic, hegemony.
We have the question: Is it possible to undo the exoticization in the human gaze? Possibly not in the short term, but probably yes in a future where we go beyond the appearance of images or where we get to know the world’s cultures with equity and respect and realise that regardless of the forms that may seem exotic to our cultures, deep down there is the human body and existence that we share.
Q: Salt, clay, tobacco, breath, sound, and erosion become active presences in your Biennale installation. What draws you to organic materials as carriers of memory, healing, and resistance?
RojoNegro: The dialogue enabled by organic materials has the potential to touch human beings’ ancestral memory. It’s a dialogue with the body, mediated by experience, observation, and calmness, to listen attentively.
Spoken or written language isn’t the only form of communication; materials communicate in their own ways. The way materials transform due to the conditions of space, climate, and the passage of time is their words. For example, a crack in the clay is a word from the clay, or the energy of sound moving through space speaks to the organs in low tones. Salt petrifies and changes because that’s its response to the environment. Putting effort into observing materials is a way to remember the impermanent nature of humans and the need to care for our relationship with the surroundings.
Q: Your work repeatedly challenges Western notions of individuality by proposing the body as a collective ecosystem inhabited by ancestors, animals, spirits, and territories. How does this understanding reshape the politics of identity in contemporary art?
RojoNegro: Our work seeks to expand the one-sided notions and concepts that Western culture has given us. Among these understandings, one that has seemed vital to us is that of the human body. We all have the same number of vital organs, the same feeling of hunger, cold, or heat, and we all can feel pain and pleasure. There are a variety of bodily factors we share as a species, but understanding them varies across cultures and is laden with ideology. The colonial homogenization that was sought around the understanding of our bodies corresponds to an ideology that is extremely distant from that of our indigenous peoples, and sometimes is even the opposite. The conception of the colonial human body is not helpful for us to face the contemporary problems caused by land overexploitation, inequality, violence, and social injustice, as well as the internal issues that come from them. That’s why we decided to turn back to the remnants of Mesoamerican conceptions of the body, which allow us to expand the possibilities of subjectivity and to understand our place on Earth.
Understanding identity in art starts from what we occidentally understand as identity, a category, a label set up for easy access and control by humans, while also being a certainty to cling to, but when taken to extremes, it turns into dogmas that we know lead to certain kinds of violence.
Politically, we believe it’s vital to include in the narrative of contemporary art ontologies that can offer ways to understand human existence that are tied to the balance of humans with each other as well as with everything that exists, not just as an act of epistemic justice, but as an act of seeking our survival and well-being.
Q: You speak about “practising peace” through non-colonial, non-patriarchal, and non-racist forms. How do ritual, listening, and slowness become political acts within your artistic practice?
RojoNegro: Ritual forms, listening, and slowness are actions outside the capitalist agenda; they create relationships. Ritual places human existence back into an ecosystem and reminds us of our interdependence with nature. For us, listening breaks the empire of the ego; swapping talking for listening opens us to understanding others and building empathy. Slowness allows for long-term thinking and considering the consequences of actions—when you act slowly, you think and reconsider what’s truly important.
Long-term thinking is necessary to sustain social and internal struggles. Feeling discouraged because social problems aren’t solved immediately is just another tool of the current capitalist system, supported by a symbolic narrative. We believe art can break down this narrative of immediacy and tell the story of counter-hegemonic efforts from a humanistic perspective, where small gestures have an incalculable potential.
Q: In your installation, the line of salt functions as a Mesoamerican symbol of speech and connection. What does it mean for you to think about language beyond words — through matter, sound, breath, and ritual gestures?
RojoNegro: The installation invites a dialogue between the body and the materials, tapping into the human body’s sensory memory and intelligence beyond reason in a subtle yet deeply profound way. Breathing is universal, and materials are living entities whose presence carries the history of their relationship with the human body through centuries and cultures. The installation seeks to awaken that sensitivity in the body, that memory, and that dialogue in a way that stimulates the deeper part of sensitivity.
We live in a world where images hyper-stimulate our brains, generating large amounts of endorphins. These stimulants enter only through the eyes while our bodies remain almost inert as we consume them. This creates a contradiction in our system that numbs human sensitivity. The installation aims to awaken the body, to awaken its sensitivity, since this is the key to accessing empathy—empathy for our own pain and for others’. Pain is the gateway to real change and well-being. If we sleep through or hide from pain, we won’t truly heal. If we work with our pain, we can develop deep solutions that, through hard work and over time, create conditions of peace and well-being for everyone.
Q: Much of your practice deals with colonial wounds carried within the body across generations. Do you see your artworks as acts of healing, remembrance, or confrontation — or all of these simultaneously?
RojoNegro: All at once, because several wills coexist in the same body, several memories and several urgencies. The approach to our projects depends on the context; we know that coloniality is present across different areas of life, so strategies need to be adaptable to avoid dogmatism.
The body is a changing, reactive universe to its environment and social context; several factors intertwine. For us, the importance of slowness and listening also lies in awareness of our own bodies. In Latin America, we are exposed to a constant atmosphere of violence, which reactivates ancestral memories, but perceiving climate change also alters tissues and organs, opening new challenges. Deciphering the body is a path of ongoing learning that always impacts collective relationships.
Practice responds to urgent and present needs; sometimes, denunciation or confrontation is needed when the context is sluggish, and sometimes negotiation is required when the context is too turbulent.
Q: You often describe the body as a site where multiple temporalities coexist. How does your work challenge linear Western ideas of time and history, especially within the context of the Venice Biennale?
RojoNegro: The linear historical narrative is a Western construct that perpetuates the fallacy of cultural and civilizational superiority, a lie that is not even beneficial to the West when analysed closely. Within this construct, the world’s indigenous cultures were relegated to the past, carrying with them the hierarchical implications of inferiority desired by those who would position themselves as the future.
Our work seeks to dismantle these lies from our bodies and our work, first of all, because the practices, objects, and ways of life that were put in place in the past still exist; they have had to survive all the campaigns that have tried to eradicate them. By showing that our work, consciously and deliberately, even within the framework of the Venice Biennale, is part of that continuity of existence, it dismantles the lie of the past and, therefore, of what is dead or fossilized, it dismantles the idea that the goal to follow is that of supposed progress, since that ‘progress’ has brought about the destruction of our planet and our imbalance with the earth, creating a hierarchy of violence and death.
Presenting a work like this in this international setting is about continuing to uphold the conviction we’ve had for more than 10 years and continuing to maintain our commitment to care, recognition, and respect for our native cultures because we believe and know from our life experience that it is a valuable contribution to the world.
Q: The concepts of nagualism and tonalism suggest fluid boundaries between humans, animals, plants, and natural forces. How do these ideas allow you to imagine alternative relationships between humanity and ecology today?
RojoNegro: Understanding the body as a space of transit between nature and humans opens the possibility of thinking about the planet with fairness and respect. There are no hierarchies because the matter of the human body is connected with all of nature—animals, minerals, plants, and many other elements. This knowledge has been preserved by our indigenous peoples, and it’s key to bringing it into the public scene because it offers solutions to ecological problems. For indigenous worldviews, the system of offering to ecosystems replaces the system of extraction. Ecosystems are essences, not resources; you walk through them and take only what’s necessary to live, with respect and a commitment to give back to nature and the beings that inhabit the landscape. The heart of the project we presented in Venice is an offering to knowledge, to the dead, to memories that are yet to be written, and to the efforts of those who have kept the struggle and the continuity of knowledge alive.
Q: Dreams, meditation, and ancestral presences play an important role in your research process. How do you balance intuitive or spiritual knowledge with the expectations of contemporary art institutions and curatorial discourse?
RojoNegro: Curatorially, we aim to work with professionals committed to freedom and plurality in art, leading us to a meeting point where intuitive processes or specialised knowledge can be woven together with concepts or concerns drawn from contemporary art. In these cases, they become collaborations that help maintain and grow our ideas in a long-term effort of consistency. Whether regrettable or fortunate, we work focused on our ideas and not on institutional expectations. Our experience in artistic institutions has depended on encountering the professionals described above within an institution, and in the best case, an institution full of this type of professional, which is rare but not impossible, because institutions are made of people, and each person is responsible for their own actions.
Q: Your work insists that Indigenous cosmologies are not relics of the past but active frameworks for imagining the future. What kinds of futures are you trying to propose through your practice?
RojoNegro: We think about a plural, multicultural future with respect for diversity and biodiversity, peace, social and epistemic justice, and a focus on values aligned with sustaining life on the planet. Our practice seeks that message, our research is strongly rooted in our territory and the worldviews of the present territory of Mexico and our origins. However, the values we aim to project are universal: they put life and peace first. The choice of materials in exhibition spaces is informed by our human connection; for example, in almost all cultures around the world, clay and salt are significant, and the relationship with the dead is a cornerstone of ritual construction. When we think of worldviews as living knowledge in the present, we also think about other forms of resistance to the exclusion that the dominant historical narrative has tried to erase. We think of many people who are resisting and have resisted, but also of micro-communities or spaces of utopia in any context, in the spaces where agreements are made from recognising all needs and perspectives, the professional spaces where knowledge and talents are put at the service of creating experiences and relationships of mutual respect with a considerable social contribution.
We believe that a future like this is viable in the long term by starting with small spaces. Art rebuilds what systems destroy. The history of the last century is also the history of art, creating and repairing human relationships.
Q: Your artist collaboration emerged from your shared search through body, territory, and historical memory. How has working collectively changed the way you understand authorship, care, and artistic responsibility?
RojoNegro: Although the duo’s name has been around for a couple of years, we don’t know exactly when it started. We only know that since our meeting as individuals 22 years ago, we began to change together and separately, maybe because we were both dealing with the same pain in different forms and because we had and still have the same dream, the same utopia, in a world that forbade itself to even mention the word. The truth is that we have learned together, we learned from our differences, we learned to be a couple, we learned to be professional artists, we keep learning every day the importance of words, commitment, consensus, we keep learning care and respect, we are still in true search of peace and equity. We have made many mistakes but we keep trying, and over the years we know that most likely we won’t see utopia, but from time to time we can hold moments of micro-utopias where something that the system wasn’t meant to allow happens, where the impositions of class, race, or gender are broken, where inequality is broken, where fair treatment is generated, talents of others are encouraged, and help is given in community. We believe that in the creation of micro-utopias, authorship gradually loses its value.
Q: The Venice Biennale often reflects global power structures within the art world. As artists from the Global South representing Mexico, how do you navigate the tension between institutional visibility and decolonial resistance?
RojoNegro: Visibility and resilience are not antagonistic; the movement of ideas and changes in art require a balance of both. Making indigenous knowledge visible is also a way to extend its life and practice, as well as to multiply the ways it can exist, but this same act, if it exceeds its scale, can be extractive and trivialise the knowledge. The balance between visibility and protection is a delicate political exercise that, in art, can succeed depending on the political awareness and social commitment of those working in the artistic context.
Q: Across your installations, performances, and rituals, there is a recurring call to reconnect with forgotten forms of knowledge and interdependence. What do you hope visitors take away after experiencing Actos invisibles para sostener el universo?
RojoNegro: We want to invite visitors to reconnect with their bodies, with their history through their bodies. We’d like to touch that deep core of human sensitivity where we all meet, regardless of the culture we come from, and channel the energy of that introspection toward the pursuit of well-being and true peace. We’d also like to remind each visitor of the importance and value of their existence and actions to the rest of the world.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
