Barbican Centre
Free
Delcy Morelos spent a month filling the Barbican’s Sculpture Court with earth and clay. Working by hand, the Colombian artist and her team layered more than ten tonnes of the stuff to create origo, a mammoth, multi-sensory installation stretching 24 metres wide and 12 metres high, named after the Latin word for ‘origin’.
For more than a decade, Morelos has asked viewers to rethink their relationship with soil; not just as the brown stuff shaken from boots or scrubbed from under our fingernails, but as the substance from which all life emerges and depends. Growing up in Tierralta, northern Colombia, Morelos is influenced by an Andean view that sees landscapes not as resources to be extracted, but deserving of care and protection.
And so here, in the Barbican’s circular courtyard, we earthlings are invited to burrow through Morelos’ ovular structure, weaving through one of six entrances before arriving in the belly of the beast. Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos’ beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain.
Then you emerge into the centre of the installation: the doughnut’s hole, open to the elements and flooded with light. Here, meditative activities such as tai chi are planned to take place, beneath the Brutalist tower blocks encircling the space. Looking up, you feel a million miles from notions of origin, nature, or earth. One does wonder whether origo would land as hard elsewhere. Removed from the context and placed within a pastoral sculpture park, for example, some of its friction – both aesthetic and ideological – might dissolve.
Speaking of, then came the unavoidable British concern: how would this survive a downpour? We’ve all watched our sandcastles turn into sorry slurry pits as the tide rolls in. I’m told there’s little risk of that here. The transformation Morelos hopes for is more incremental: the work slowly absorbing the British summer in all its fits and rages, leaving traces across its surface.
Those visiting in the late July heat may not encounter quite the same origo they saw during May’s showers. Londoners are invited to return, to get close, to observe its changes, and reconsider it as something deserving of care. Earth, after all, is the name we decided to give the planet we call home.
