Delcy Morelos brings 30-tonne earth sculpture to Barbican
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- Delcy Morelos is bringing Origo, a 30-tonne earthwork, to the Barbican's Sculpture Court in London as a free, open-access outdoor installation.
- Origo is a 24-metre-wide ovular pavilion with cave-like passages and a central patio where meditative activities such as tai chi will take place.
- The Womb Space, Morelos' previous earthwork in Mexico City, drew more than 60,000 visitors over its nine-month run, with soil regionally sourced from a visitor's home area.
- Morelos' practice draws on Andean cosmovision — a worldview in which rivers, mountains and earth are sentient beings — shaped by her Amazonian teacher Isaías Román, for whom 'the universe is a tejido, a woven fabric.'
- Morelos, 58, grew up in Tierralta, Colombia, and initially produced blood-red paintings addressing paramilitary violence over coca-rich territory before turning to soil as material 'to be cared for, not possessed.'
- The installation will be dismantled in August, a deliberate embrace of impermanence: 'There's a fetish, almost, that artworks should be preserved for ever. But I like the idea of impermanence.'
- Her work has shown globally, including Earthly Paradise at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and she frames her pieces as 'a mission, a vocation' countering extractivist culture.
Why it matters: By offering Origo for free and planning its August dismantling, Morelos models a counter-economics to the gallery preservationist norm — treating soil as a living relationship rather than a permanent artifact. Her placement of 30 tonnes of earth inside the Barbican's angular concrete shell makes a major London institution a platform for an indigenous-rooted critique of extractivism.
