A permanent outdoor artwork by RojoNegro, the artist duo representing Mexico at the 61st Venice Biennale, has been unveiled on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Titled La asamblea del barro, or The Clay Assembly, the 2026 work stands outside the university's Triton Center and is made from 260 individually hand-painted ceramic tiles mounted on four panels shaped like trees.

The duo is formed by María Sosa and Noé Martínez, life partners from Michoacán who are now based in Mexico City. Sosa has Purépecha roots, while Martínez's family comes from Mexico's Huasteca region. Their joint practice foregrounds Indigenous ways of knowing and works against colonial narratives, drawing on materials and customs that have survived four centuries of violent erasure.

The installation takes as its subject the four cosmic trees that, in Mesoamerican thought, hold up the universe. The artists describe the idea as one that lives on among Indigenous peoples today, bearing witness to a form of cultural and ideological resistance. Through the tiles, the work traces how cultural memory passes between generations, and how Mesoamerican and Western systems of knowledge remain bound together through the history of colonialism.

The commission places the duo's practice in a public, outdoor setting on an American university campus, where students and visitors encounter it as part of daily life rather than inside a gallery. It also arrives while the pair prepare to represent Mexico on one of the art world's largest stages, giving the San Diego work a role as a public statement of the ideas they will carry to Venice.