A Womb within a Womb: A Conversation on Delcy Morelos's origo

Antonio Echeverría: Diego, I would like to begin by going back in time. A few years ago you were in Santiago for ‘Tierra de nadie’ (No Man’s Land), the exhibition you curated at Il Posto. On one of those trips you went to Bogotá to meet Delcy Morelos.⁰¹ The last time we were together, in London last year, we spoke about this intervention just as it was entering its final stage before production. I would like to start there: why did you feel Delcy was the artist for this place and for the Barbican? What did you see in her work, and in her studio during that visit, that could meet the Sculpture Court in a particular way?

Diego Chocano: That trip was in July 2024, right after the week we spent together in Santiago installing and opening the show. By then I had been thinking about the project for two or three months; about why I wanted to invite Delcy to intervene in the Sculpture Court, a space that is rarely used at the Barbican and that had not been activated for more than ten years.

It is worth giving some context about the series of commissions origo belongs to. It is the third in a series that began in 2023 and seeks to take the visual arts out of the galleries and into the public areas of the Barbican. It started with Ranjani Shettar, an artist from India, who built sculptures of organic forms using a particular wood from the region where she lives and works, together with muslin she wove by hand in her studio.⁰² Those sculptures were shown inside the Barbican’s Conservatory – a beautiful space, with an incredible abundance of plants –where the contrast between the organic and those enormous concrete columns and walls is extremely sharp, concrete being the Barbican’s defining material and being omnipresent across the site. We then invited the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama to intervene on the façade of that monumental three-storey building. Working with hundreds of artisans from Tamale, in northern Ghana, Mahama wove a textile of almost two thousand square metres that wrapped that surface.⁰³

When it came to thinking about what the third project would be, I looked backed at those two commissions and found a very clear logic connecting them. In both cases, an  important material dialogue was established with the Barbican’s architecture: in Shettar’s case through wood and cloth, and in Mahama’s through brightly coloured textile. That dialogue between organic materials and concrete was central. So I wanted to continue along that line, working with an artist whose practice is deeply material, one in which the material itself is what matters.

The second logic was the tactile. Both artists work with their hands, and you feel that in the works. For me, the most beautiful thing about those earlier projects was the way the traces of the hand entered into dialogue with the Barbican’s surfaces, which themselves worked by hand over many years. Those surfaces almost function as containers of memory, as archives holding very complex, and at times, very unsettling histories of labour.⁰⁴

These two conceptual threads made Delcy an obvious choice. She has a very strong material practice, in which earth is both the object and the subject of the work, and she makes everything by hand. She makes monumental pieces working with a relatively small team, and it shows. You feel the tactile quality and the care. She says that, for her, the work is an offering to the earth, and that is very present on the surface of her pieces, just as those histories are present on the surface of the Barbican.

I already admired her work enormously. When Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, proposed that I curate a commission, I had just seen her exhibition at Dia Chelsea, which made a deep impression on me.⁰⁵ What struck me most was her sensitivity to space, form and architecture, but also to the social and critical histories those spaces carry. So I began to fantasise. Because working with her really was a dream, about that dialogue between earth and the Barbican’s concrete. What it would mean, what those two materials would say to each other, and what we would hear as visitors to the work.

AE: I find that idea very beautiful: that encountering Delcy’s work is a form of passage, in the same way that one enters the work and enters the Barbican. There is something very particular about the Barbican: you are in the city, in a financial district with its own logic, and suddenly you step into that hard Brutalist capsule but which also was a utopian project with very specific intentions. In that sense, the building itself functions as a site-specific work, where architecture is not taken for granted but placed at the service of a worldview. Beyond the programme of interventions into the architecture, how does Delcy’s proposal engage with the Barbican’s own history, as a place that was bombed and destroyed, and where a form of collective life was imagined through the reconstruction of something held in common?

DC: That’s a very apt reading. Delcy told me many times that origo is a womb inside the womb that is the Barbican, which is inside the womb that is London. She thought a great deal about those layers. And yes, the Barbican was built with the idea of being a city within a city. I love thinking of it as a site-specific intervention. I had never put it that way, but it feels right.

For me, the dialogue between origo and the Barbican’s history is one of the most important aspects of this project, and of Delcy’s work in general. Very few readings of her practice go in that direction: her work is not usually thought of as an intervention into the social, political and architectural histories of a space, and yet that seems to me one of the most powerful and explicit dimensions of what she does.

The Barbican was built, as you said, on ground that had been completely destroyed by the Blitz, and was conceived by the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a project of utopian housing, in response to the devastation of the Second World War.⁰⁶ The idea was to build flats with integrated green spaces and, above all, to put art at the centre of the daily lives of its inhabitants. Around two thousand flats were built around a cultural centre housing galleries, theatres, concert halls and cinemas. It was part of a vision typical of the post-war period, shaped by a strong social idealism and a civic way of thinking about the world. The same broader vision which gave rise to institutions such as the National Health Service – which, frankly, is a miracle that it exists at all.

origo engages with those histories, and with the humanist, rational and functional thinking about housing and about dwelling that shaped the Barbican. And for me, one of its most important facets is that it invites us to think of community and communal life as something that goes beyond the human species. I am thinking of an essay by curator Lisa Le Feuvre that cites the anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, who speaks not of humans and nature but of earth-beings: distinct, active entities that are nonetheless completely entangled, not separate.⁰⁷ If the Barbican fosters an individualism in which each person lives separately, in which green spaces are at the service of human experience and culture appears as something paramount and severed from nature, I think origo attempts the opposite.

It is a respectful critique, because there is respect for these ideas, for the Barbican’s architecture and for modernism. Delcy is a student of modernism, of minimalism and of abstraction, and she loves those aesthetic traditions. But there is also a critique of the humanist thinking that underpins the building. You could see this idea of a community of earth-being taking shape immediately: as soon as we began adding soil to the installation, the foxes that are always around the Barbican started coming inside and nesting in the work. We placed chia seeds on its outer parts and birds came to eat them. We created a space for multispecies coexistence, which was lovely and which, for me, almost inverted the humanist thinking of the Barbican’s architects.

AE: At the same time, the work brings other geographical into the Barbican, along with Latin American and Indigenous customs and traditions. I am thinking, for instance, of the organisation of communal life around a shared central space. How did that encounter with an ancestral tradition emerge during the process?

DC: Delcy likes to say that ‘the future is ancestral’, a reference to Ailton Krenak, the philosopher and writer from the Brazilian Amazon whose thinking has greatly informed her own.⁰⁸ Delcy comes from the Colombian Caribbean, from Tierralta, and grew up in a house where there was little distinction between inside and outside. She told me a story from her childhood many times: the first thing she did every morning was to wet her hands and dampen the floor so the dust would not rise, working on the ground and making these circular movements. For her, that was her first work.

The first time we met, one of the first things she said to me was that she was an artist of the nineties who encountered shamanism. That is to say, she comes from a generation in which post-Minimalism and abstraction were the strongest currents, and she remains interested in exploring these modes of art practice. However, they are now injected with the expressive, vital energy of the earth. She is a disciple of Isaías Román, a Witoto elder from the Araracuara region on the Caquetá River, and it is from those teachings that the idea of the human being as a very small part of a weave comes, or of thinking of the world as a form of basket.⁰⁹ All of this comes from cosmovisions and ancestral traditions she has learned through her own culture, but also through her many journeys and experiences in the Amazon.

AE: That childhood story is very interesting, because within it there is an early understanding that certain bodily gestures, which are also material ones, can transform a setting. And I think the genealogy Delcy belongs to – Land art, Minimalism, post-Minimalism – has a lot to do with understanding art practice as a way of engaging with and transforming the conditions if a place where the work is situated. I wanted to ask you about the institutional reverse of that. You have said elsewhere that working with her meant learning another language, the language of soil and earth. What did the institution have to learn in order to work with Delcy, and how must it transform itself to host a work that is finite, material and organic, and that’s also exposed to London’s weather, which swings from cold and darkness to heatwaves?

DC: Exactly. Throughout the project Delcy had to remind me many times that, in order to work with earth, you have to speak its language. That working with earth is itself a language, one that not everyone masters and that is not easy to teach. It is a language she herself is still expanding after more than a decade of working with it. That was the main lesson for me, both as a curator within an institution and as the person representing that institution in our relationship.

For instance, it was hard for us to account for how long it would take our very talented technicians   to learn that language, and that it was probably better to bring in Delcy’s team, a team that already spoke it.

We also had to learn to give up a degree of control. We began installing origo without a clear idea of what the finish of the earth would be. We had the protocoal in place, but we had not yet determined how the surface would look. When Delcy arrived, we gave her a section of the installation, almost like a blank canvas, and told her: start working and let’s see what comes out. She spent two or three days until she found the finish she wanted. I don’t know how you see it, but one of the first things you learn as a curator is that by the time you get to the install, most decisions are supposed to have been made. Once you are in the space, unexpected things always happen and the work can change, but you have to arrive with a developed idea. Not having one frightened me a little. And yet that process of arriving at the space, touching the earth and talking to the earth is fundamental to her work: she listens to the earth, responds to its temperament and works it after those conversations. As the representative of the institution, it was hard for me to accept that ceding of control, and also to tell the rest of the institution that we weren’t sure how it was going to look.

The other important thing you mention is that these are living works, literally: there are microorganisms and plants inside them, they are in constant transformation. Her works breathe; they influence their surroundings as much as they are influenced by them. That constant change also demands relinquising control, and for an institution with well-established processes, that was difficult – not so much to understand as to accept. To grasp that the original vision we had of the installation was not going to hold, that the work is finite and ephemeral – that it will change in colour and in form. It was a new process for many of us, and it took us time to get used to it. These are the kinds of frictions produced by Delcy’s work, and they seem very productive to me. Many institutions have very standardised ways of working, and her work forces you to depart from them. That for me, was precisely where the value of the processes lies: it forced the Barbican to reconsider its own modus operandi.

AE: origo is very different from other projects you have (co-)curated recently at the Barbican. I am thinking of ‘Unravel’ and of the Beatriz González retrospective, which is now shown in Oslo.¹⁰ Even so, I sense that certain concerns keep returning, among them the question of how Latin American identities are mediated through contemporary art. This is something you explored in the exhibition at Il Posto and, earlier, as a student, through a reading of certain exhibitions from the nineties. How do you see that trajectory, and where do you think it is heading?

DC: For me the clear link between ‘Unravel’, which was an exhibition about contemporary practices working with textiles, and origo is the way material is understood as a fundamental part of the concept of the work. ‘Unravel’ explored how artists subverted and mobilised the associations of gender and race that textiles carry in order to articulate political messages. The medium, the material, was intrinsic to each work in that show. And I think that applies to Delcy’s work as well: the concept is shaped by the material.

It is curious, because having Beatriz González and Delcy Morelos at the Barbican meant I had to think a lot about their similarities and the overlaps in their practices. At first, I thought they did not have much in common, other than they both emerge from Colombia’s very violent history, which they address in different ways. But as I thought about it further, what interested me enormously is that both are rigorous students of art history who enter into dialogue with these histories to find ways  to subvert them in very elegant and highly conceptual manners. Beatriz did so through a deliberately coarse pictorial style and through popular materials; Delcy engages with these histories by giving Minimalism and abstraction an expressive vitality through earth.

What all of these projects have in common is that I am very interested in learning about artists who address narratives perceived as dominant or hegemonic, and who offer alternatives to them, through highly conceptual practices. I think that is where my work as a curator is heading.

AE: To begin drawing this to a close, I wanted to ask you about the context in which this work appears. origo arrives in London at a moment marked by the climate crisis and its specific consequences, such as energy dependency, which we now see strained by the war in the Middle East, and by the ways in which Europe continues to depend on resources it extracts beyond its borders. The work brings that geographical displacement into tension. How does this affect the way the work may be received by those who visit it? How do you negotiate the clash between a contemplative experience and those critical layers that might otherwise go unnoticed?

DC: Delcy began working with earth while thinking a great deal about violence and about the armed conflict in Colombia. She says she realised that the logic that leads human beings to harm one another, or to invade territories, is the same colonial logic that makes us believe we are the owners of other earth-beings. In turn, this leads us to see non-human nature as a resource or a commodity to be controlled and exploited. For her, the same logic underlies both forms of violence: the violence of war and ecological violence.

That is why she is interested in creating spaces or, as she puts it, designing experiences in which one’s relationship with the earth and with other beings can change and shift towards a more ethical one. origo is her most immersive work: one of the few which you can enter and be completely enveloped by the earth. Delcy always says that to enter a work is to allow yourself to be permeated by that which you are permeating. There is an experience of reciprocity there, and I hope it leads our visitors to rethink their relationship with territory and with what we mistakenly call natural resources.

I am very interested in philosopher Jane Bennett’s idea of enchantment: if you allow yourself to be enchanted by your surroundings, by the everyday, you begin to form ethical bonds with that environment.¹¹ I think one of the most important aspects of Delcy’s work is that it not only offers a contemplative space, but creates the conditions for enchantment. origo is a very mysterious work, very beautiful, at times unsettling, and it has a very animal quality that I don’t think her other works have had. I hope that, in experiencing it, people can establish those ethical bonds with the earth and allow themselves be enchanted by the earth and by the environment Delcy has created.

AE: Those are beautiful words to close with. And how wonderful that it may not only humans who allow themselves to be enchanted by the work, but that foxes, birds and other beings might find their way to origo too, wherever it is present.