Delcy Morelos planted 30 tonnes of spice-infused soil in the middle of London’s most uncompromising brutalist complex — and the Barbican‘s Sculpture Court, unused for its original purpose for a decade, has never felt more alive. Origo, commissioned by the Barbican and on view until 31 July 2026, is the most ambitious outdoor work the Colombian artist has produced to date: a 24-by-18-metre oval earthwork rising over three metres from the paved court, hand-built from clay, soil, hay, plant seed, cinnamon, and cloves by Morelos and her team over more than a month of physical labour. It is also, as Morelos frames it, a philosophical position made material: “In Andean ancestral traditions, the human being is living earth. I am a body, I am earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the center and mirror of what we are.”
The biography behind the work is inseparable from its material. Born in 1967 in Tierralta, in Colombia’s Córdoba region — an area devastated by armed conflict rooted in illegal land appropriation and large-scale mining throughout the 1990s and early 2000s — Morelos began her practice making paintings from red clay pigments that mapped the entanglements between body, territory, and violence. That origin is not incidental context. It is the conceptual engine of everything she has made since. Soil, for Morelos, is not a sculptural medium in the conventional sense — it is a site-specific earthwork material carrying political weight, ecological memory, and ancestral Andean knowledge about the relationship between human bodies and the land they inhabit. The earth does not belong to us; we belong to it.
The departure from Morelos’ established formal language is significant. Over the last decade, she has developed a vocabulary of precise, angular earthen forms — geometric volumes that impose order on organic matter. Origo breaks that pattern deliberately. The structure takes on a rounded, ovular shape that the artist describes as a response to the Barbican’s own architectural features: its curved residential terraces, its circular towers, its concentric geometries. The result is something closer to a geological formation than a sculpture — a form that looks as though it might have always been there, pushing up through the paving, preceding the concrete that surrounds it. The soil installation appears, in certain lights and from certain angles, older than the building it sits beside.
Inside, the logic inverts. A series of openings — hollows carved through the volume, informed by the geometry of ancient burial sites — serve as entry points into internal tunnels that lead to a central courtyard. Each tunnel has its own symmetry and depth; each draws light differently depending on the hour and the angle of the sun. The movement through the structure is one of inward circulation — the body drawn into the earth rather than moving across its surface. Curator Diego Chocano describes the effect precisely: “Its monumentality is contrasted by the humility of its materials and the intimacy of its inner tunnels, which our visitors are invited to flow through.” The Barbican Sculpture Court installationasks visitors not to stand before it and look, but to enter it and be absorbed.
The spices are not decoration. Cinnamon and cloves were mixed into the earthen body of Origo for reasons that are simultaneously functional and philosophical. Both contain antifungal properties essential for maintaining the biological health of the soil over the course of the exhibition — a practical decision that doubles as an argument about the intelligence embedded in ancestral knowledge systems. The heady, warm fragrance that fills the Sculpture Court as a result creates a multisensory art experience that operates below the threshold of conscious analysis: visitors who have never read a word about Morelos’ practice will feel the work before they understand it. The smell triggers memory and emotion in ways that visual experience alone cannot. It is, as the press release states, a “sensory encounter that encourages a more ethical relationship with what Morelos calls the ‘mother of all materials’.”
The dialogue with the Barbican’s brutalism is the conceptual hinge of the entire project. The Barbican was designed in 1959 by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon — influenced by Le Corbusier — as a utopian city within a city: high-density housing, elevated walkways, integrated cultural infrastructure, humanist approaches to urban living. Its concrete surfaces are hand-hewn, intensely tactile, bearing the marks of the labour that produced them. The Sculpture Court was conceived from the outset as a space where art would be integrated into the rhythms of everyday communal life. Origo responds to all of this with a precision that feels earned rather than assigned: it places the precarious and malleable in dialogue with the rigid and imposing, as Morelos puts it, highlighting the permeability of our bodies and their entanglement with the very material of the earth. Concrete and soil share more than they appear to — both are composed of the earth, both carry the trace of human hands, both age in public view.
The shadow gap at the base is the installation’s most restrained formal decision. The volume of Origo perches on a recessed base, creating a thin line of shadow that makes the entire mass appear to float fractionally above the paving. It is a detail so small it might be missed entirely — and so precise that once noticed, it changes the reading of the whole. An earthwork this heavy and this dense, hovering. The gap is less than a centimeter, but it does the work of the entire installation’s tonal argument: the earth is not anchored here. It arrived, and it could leave. The outdoor public sculpture makes its temporary status visible in its foundation.
The scale of the physical labour deserves its own paragraph. Morelos and her team applied over 30 tonnes of soil and clay by hand across more than a month of construction. No machinery shaped the exterior surface — the texture that visitors see, rough and organic and alive with irregularity, is the direct record of human touch at monumental scale. Chocano described it as “a gargantuan task that was physically and emotionally taxing but incredibly gratifying.” In a field increasingly mediated by digital fabrication and industrial production, Origo insists on the irreducible value of the handmade — not as nostalgia but as argument. The hand-built earthen sculpture carries the labour of its making as content, not as process. For a comparable commitment to earth as both material and political statement in a public outdoor context, the recent Desert X AlUla 2026 land art commissions in Saudi Arabia demonstrate how site-specific earthworks are increasingly becoming the most urgent format in contemporary public art.
What Origo ultimately proposes — and this is the claim worth taking seriously — is that the most radical act of public art in 2026 is not technological disruption or institutional critique but the placement of 30 tonnes of living earth in the middle of a post-war utopian housing complex, scented with cinnamon, open to the rain, slowly changing as seeds germinate within its walls. Morelos has built something that the Barbican’s architects would have recognized as continuous with their own project — not an interruption of the communal space but a deepening of it. The Colombian artist earthwork expands the definition of who belongs in that community: not just the human residents of the estate, but the microorganisms in the soil, the seeds that will or will not germinate, the spices releasing their fragrance into the London air. Community, as Origo proposes it, occurs beyond our species.
Delcy Morelos: origo by Delcy Morelos | Where: Barbican Sculpture Court, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS — When: 15 May – 31 July 2026.