delcy morelos brings living body of earth into london’s barbican
For ‘origo’, Colombian artist Delcy Morelos fills the Sculpture Court of the Barbican Centre with soil, scent, darkness, and touch. Opening on May 15th, 2026, the monumental installation invites visitors to walk through tunnels made from clay, hay, seeds, and spices, creating an experience that feels like stepping inside a living body. Presented under the Barbican’s public commissioning program, the project marks Morelos’ first major public work in the UK and the first activation of the Sculpture Court in nearly a decade.
Against the Barbican’s vast concrete architecture, Morelos introduces a porous, fragile, and deeply tactile work. The rough surfaces of brutalism meet the warmth of earth, humidity, smell, and hand-worked matter, opening space for a quieter and more intimate way of being together.
Installation view, Delcy Morelos: origo at the Barbican, London, 15 May – 31 July 2026 | all images by Barbican Art Gallery / Thomas Adank. © Delcy Morelos
earth as memory, body, and relation
Born in Tierralta, Colombia, in a region deeply affected by armed conflict, land extraction, and displacement, Morelos has spent decades working with earth as a living presence. Her early works used red clay pigments to explore the relationship between violence, territory, and the human body. Over time, those investigations expanded into large-scale installations that immerse viewers physically and emotionally.
Delcy Morelos draws from ancestral Andean and Amazonian understandings of land as something alive and interconnected with human existence. Soil, for her, carries memory, care, spirituality, and labor, a philosophy that shapes every aspect of her installations, from the monumental forms she builds to the spices she incorporates into them. Cinnamon and cloves scent the work while also protecting the soil through their antifungal properties, allowing the material to remain active and healthy throughout the exhibition.
Her installations are meant to be felt through the body as much as understood intellectually. Visitors are encouraged to move slowly through darkness, smell damp earth and spices, notice changes in temperature and sound, and become aware of their own physical proximity to the ground beneath them. In recent years, this approach has brought Morelos international recognition through exhibitions at institutions including Hamburger Bahnhof, Dia Chelsea, and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo.
Delcy Morelos installs monumental earthen pavilion within the Barbican sculpture court
a soft intervention within brutalist architecture
At the Barbican, Morelos places this living material directly in conversation with one of the most iconic brutalist complexes in the world. Designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a utopian vision for postwar communal life, the Barbican has long represented ideas of permanence, structure, and social order through concrete.
origo responds to that history through contrast and proximity. Measuring 24 meters by 18 meters and rising more than three meters high, the installation takes the form of an ovular pavilion with multiple entrances leading inward. Unlike the sharp geometries that often characterize Morelos’ earlier works, this structure feels rounded, soft, and protective. Visitors are invited to wander through its earth-lined tunnels before arriving at a quiet central enclosure.
Inside the work, the city feels distant. Light changes gradually, sound becomes muted, and the smell of soil fills the air. The installation asks people to slow down and reconsider their relationship with the ecosystems that sustain life beneath urban surfaces.
In this encounter between earth and cement, Morelos proposes an understanding of community that extends beyond the human, suggesting that living together also means acknowledging our entanglement with soil, microorganisms, plants, and the material systems we often ignore.
the project reactivates the Barbican sculpture court for the first time in nearly a decade
reactivating the sculpture court through collective experience
The project also reawakens the original civic ambition of the Barbican’s Sculpture Court, which was conceived as a shared public space where art could become part of everyday life. Morelos returns the space to that purpose while expanding it through her own cosmology, filling it with a tactile and communal environment.
Throughout her practice, the artist resists separating ecological thinking from social and political histories. Her installations speak about extraction, colonial violence, care, spirituality, and coexistence all at once, but they do so through atmosphere and material. In origo, these ideas become physical within the Barbican’s concrete landscape. Morelos creates a space that reminds us that softness can hold memory, resilience, and collective power and that even in the middle of the city, the earth remains alive beneath our feet.
the installation invites visitors to gather, wander, and rest within its earthen enclosure
Morelos places softness, tactility, and living matter in dialogue with brutalist concrete