For this monumental multisensory installation, Morelos draws on wattle-and-daub, a technique spanning the Americas, Africa, and Central Europe since more than 6 000 years.
Morelos’ practice is rooted in a desire to restore connections between humans and their environment: “For me, matter is alive” she says, “Earth produces and nurtures life; it is not inert”. And she adds: “I want people to reconnect with soil, with plants and their uses.”
The large trapezoidal installation - 14 metres long and 9 metres wide – is built with the intricate, protective complexity of a bird’s nest. The construction is made from hazel panels onto which is layered a mixture of red clay from Wallonia, sand, hay, and spices such as cinnamon and cloves.
As with all her creations, Delcy Morelos commissions a professional fragrance designer to create a specific scent for the work. For her installation at Bozar, the artist has collaborated with the fragrance designer Nadjib Achaibou to imbue the space and visitors with scents reminiscent of humid soil, wood, flowers and other natural oils.
Spiritual encounter
The organic materials used by the artist carry their own energies and memories, inviting communion with something beyond the visible. Invoking “Pachamama”, the Earth-Mother in Inca mythology, Morelos offers a vision of the earth as sensuous and powerful, grounded in Indigenous beliefs and ancestral knowledge.
The smell of the earth and spices trigger memories and emotions. “The piece enters your body through your nostrils”, says Morelos “and in that moment you become one with the work”. She adds: “This mound of earth is like an altar and a machine for giving affection. It’s a mountain that embraces you.”
Visitors are also encouraged to step inside the work barefoot, in direct contact with the earth. As Morelos notes, “Walking barefoot, fragile yet grounded. It reconnects the body to ancient memories and to the Earth.” Morelos also invites visitors to gently caress the surfaces of her work. She explains: “To touch the earth is to be touched by her.”
Spanning half of the Horta Hall, the installation invites visitors into close proximity, offering an intense physical and sensory encounter.
To be in touch with the earth and to enter within it is to be in touch with what constitutes and nourishes us; the bedrock where life develops while it is inhabited by the soul.
Architectural conversation
Delcy Morelos has built a structure resembling both a nest and a temple: its form evokes ritual structures such as Mesoamerican pyramids, Ancient Egyptian tombs known as mastabas, or Amazonian maloca houses. But the artist also sees her creation at Bozar,- titled “Uterus in Uterus” - as a womb in which one can nestle and shelter. A place where one can feel a connection with greater forces: those of the life and the power of creation.
The artwork also dialogues with Bozar’s art deco architecture. The opening on top allows the sunlight – streaming through the glass roof - to enter the artwork. Morelos’ warm, organic installation interacts and contrasts with the structured, geometrical Horta Hall made of marble, concrete and glass.
Through this dialogue of materials, Morelos also invites visitors to look anew at the materials that comprise the architecture of Hall Horta. Marble, which is omnipresent in the space, shares the same origin as the earth used by the artist: both come from nature, from the mountains. By bringing together these materials that seem to be opposites – marble, cold and monumental, and earth, warm and malleable – Morelos reveals their deep connection with nature and highlights the poetic power of the elements that surround us.
Deeply sensory, immersive, and introspective, the installation of Delcy Morelos encourages a shift in perception, opening a space between physical presence and inner experience. “I’m interested in liminal states, moments between consciousness and dream,” the artist adds.
Ancestral knowledge is vital for shaping a better future, as Ailton Krenak says, “If humanity has a future, it is ancestral.”
