La Jornada: The RojoNegro collective establishes a dialogue between the body and history

The RojoNegro collective, made up of artists María Sosa (Morelia, 1985) and Noé Martínez (Morelia, 1986), represents Mexico in the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale with the “most mature and complete” version of a project they have been working on for a decade.

The heart of Invisible acts to sustain the universetitle of the ensemble set up in the Mexico Pavilion, is a video performance that is based on the duo’s first collaboration that, over time, became a “laboratory” for experimentation. This first effort was presented at the independent Venice International Performance Art Week festival. The audiovisual started at that time from the body position of archaeological figures from western Mexico (Michoacán, Jalisco, Colima and Nayarit).

This first work “triggered in us many questions and a desire to search for meaning and significance from the experience of our body when placing ourselves in this position. We realized that much of pre-Hispanic art represented, more than the mimesis of the body, the tension and experience of being in these positions. This coincided with much of what our original cultures continue to connote to the body: the strength in the legs, what the hips, shoulders, arms and belly mean as emotional centers important,” Martínez points out to The Day.

Reconnection with ancestors

They worked with a choreographer for this and other previous versions. According to Sosa and Martínez, the body is “an archive that has drawers and you have to know how to open them. The first vision we made started from an intuitive moment, in the sense that our body wanted to say something or question archeology or what until that moment we knew about objects. Afterwards, we received classes in order to think of a language and tools that the body itself could say.

“It is a very profound experience for us that has reconnected us with many of our ancestors, although it has also made us understand a lot of the conversations we have with other fellow artists, with the original festivals, with specialists in rituals, anthropologists and archaeologists. It is an opening channel to understand all the original knowledge in a simple and intellectual way,” says Martínez.

Participating in the Venice Biennale meant “asking ourselves what we wanted to say to Mexico and the world from this country,” Sosa continues. Apart from video performance, Invisible acts to sustain the universe It includes a salt and mud installation intended as “an offering and healing towards our dead. The multiple and millions of dead that we have in our country,” says Sosa. Salt and mud also refer to the body “not only for our cultures, but they are archetypal materials in the cultures of the world that refer to the body.”

The shape of the floor installation is taken from a Teotihuacan seal consisting of “two flowered virgules; possibly, of song and poetry. We interpret it as a conversation; then, we seek to generate a dialogue between our bodies, our history, but also our present on different planes: of the living and the dead, the plane of the invisible entities to which we thank life. The entire pavilion revolves around that: touching the most essential thing that is life and the human heart,” Sosa points out.

A sound composition commissioned by Alberto Rubí recreates the atmosphere of the ensemble. It consists of a series of ethnographic recordings made by him as field work and a collaboration with a friend who raps in Totonaco.

“We are also interested in a poetics of fragment. When observing the installation with salt and mud, there are cracks in the latter. For us, it is important to show a living clay, not an archaeological one that is only in a display case, but one that reacts to the temperature and humidity of the environment,” says Sosa. “These cracks are his words. He is conversing, taking up the figure. The cracks, the pieces of audio, of performative interpretation that we make, refer to the fragment. We start from the minimum, from the contact of one person with another. The small can reveal a whole that is important with respect to our cultural or archaeological heritage.

“The fragments sometimes do not take center stage, despite revealing an entire way of creating and thinking. They are always pieces that stick together again, although they do not return to being like the original. For us it is necessary that they touch something in the present, they say something to current problems. In some way this installation pays tribute to these fragments, that is, these material testimonies of a whole way of thinking that is not dead, that there is a continuity or that we want this to happen too,” Martínez maintains.

Sosa and Martínez have known each other for 20 years. Everyone has their independent practice; However, they are in a constant exchange. The name RojoNegro refers to the four cardinal points that the colors have in Mesoamerica. Red refers to the east, while black refers to the west. “We wanted to honor the origin of our families. Noé’s comes from the Huasteca of Potosí, so it corresponds to red. Mine, since it is from western Mexico, Michoacán and Guanajuato, corresponds to black.

“Our collective handles the idea of ​​focusing on the body. Since the body is an archive, a container of knowledge, a resistance in itself, we wanted a name that indicates the territory of this body to which it belongs geographically,” says Sosa.