Crazy Pablo: The Matter of Earth

How disconnected we are from the earth. Does it hold a kind of genetic memory, layers of time, life, and death compacted over billions of years?

Author

Inbal Zakai
January 25, 2026

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Embrace the Earth

Colombian artist Delcy Morelos transforms the museum into a sacred landscape of earth. Over 60 tons of soil, mixed with cinnamon, cloves, cocoa powder, cassava flour, and water, are compacted into towering walls and soft ground that visitors can walk through or alongside.

The space is dark, quiet, and fragrant, an immersive environment where earth is not a background material, but a protagonist. The soil absorbs sound, slows movement, and surrounds the body with texture and scent.

Fun Fact

Delcy Morelos was born in 1967 in Tierralta, Córdoba, a rural region of Colombia shaped by rivers, forests, and Indigenous cosmologies. As a child, she played with mud instead of toys, and learned to feel the earth as something alive, breathing, remembering, and healing.

Her early life was marked by violence and displacement, but also by deep ancestral knowledge passed down through oral traditions. These formative experiences continue to shape her work, which blends Indigenous worldviews, Catholic mysticism, and a feminist connection to land and body.

Think About It

This is art you don’t just look at - you breathe it in. You feel it in your feet, in your skin, in your lungs. Delcy Morelos’s earth installations invite a full-body experience: a return to the ground, both physically and spiritually.

As you walk through, you might wonder: are we being pulled back into the soil? What scents rise up to meet us, and what memories do they stir? There’s something almost primal about it: the reminder that we are temporary, and the earth is forever.

The work doesn’t just evoke mortality. It also asks: what toll does the earth pay for our progress? What toll do we pay in return? How connected are we, really, to the land that holds us?

How does it relate to the here and now? or What to say during casual conversation to show off your art knowledge?

The Ground Remembers – “I read this piece about Delcy Morelos’s earth installations and it really stuck with me. It made me think how, in a time of globalization, mass migration, and revolutions, our connection to land isn’t just political or symbolic, it’s physical. We don’t only think about where we come from, we feel it. The soil, the place, the ground carries memory. And even when people move, that connection stays in the body, sometimes more deeply than any flag or ideology.”

Now have another Look!

And If You’re Up for More…

  1. Right now at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Delcy Morelos’s monumental earth installation fills the space with soil, scent, and weight. It’s an immersive encounter with land as memory and material.

Till next time, isn’t it wild how the ground beneath us shapes who we are? The soil, the weight, the smells, the textures - they root us, steady us, and quietly remind us where we come from, even when we’re far from home. I’d love to hear what stayed with you. hit reply or drop me a comment.

Yours,
Inbal Z M

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