RojoNegro (Noé Martinez and María Sosa)

MAZ presents Volví a ser vasija, volví a ser animal, volví a ser planta, volví a ser tiempo by RojoNegro (Noé Martinez and María Sosa).

I became a vessel again, I became an animal again, I became a plant again, I became time again allows the expansion of one of the MAZ lines of research, which makes it possible to imagine collaborative practices between artists. The exhibition presents the first exhibition of RojoNegro, a third entity that works in virtual independence from the duo of artists that make it up: Noé Martínez and María Sosa.

Through the set of sculptural installations I went back to being a monkey (2023), I went back to being tobacco (2023), I went back to being a tlacuache (2023) and I went back to being a mushroom (2023), made specifically for the exhibition presented at the Lola Álvarez Bravo Room of the MAZ, RojoNegro investigates ways to signify processes of the present from the pre-Hispanic past, using the body as an archive, library or conduit to access experiences, emotions and entities linked to them since before birth. The installations are made up of anthropomorphic sculptures made of sandstone ceramic with a slip, soft leather sculptures and paintings resting on the floor.

In its process, the concepts of “nahualism” and “tonalism” served as a driving force for thought by enabling the extension of the person, of the “I”, towards other entities. Using reconstruction, the works reinterpret Mesoamerican objects, such as vessels and anthropomorphic, phytomorphic and zoomorphic figures, representing the expansion of their bodies towards their soul entities. The documentation of these performative actions is projected in the two-channel video Grammatical of Sleep (2022).

The research uses non-Western tools such as recurring dreams, experiences and encounters, as well as active meditation processes that materialize in a plant and an animal being: tobacco and the opossum, in the case of Sosa; the mushroom and the monkey in Martínez's. By recognizing that their bodies do not belong to the pre-Hispanic world and it is not possible to obtain certainty about the Mesoamerican past, the investigation into tonalism is presented as a tool to recover knowledge that escapes the sciences and challenges colonial thinking about vestiges of yesterday.

— Museo de Arte de Zapopan