origo

At the centre of the Barbican’s concrete Sculpture Court, Delcy Morelos has built a vast earth structure that feels almost unreal inside the city. origo is a 24-metre-wide installation made from clay, soil, hay, seeds and spices, shaped entirely by hand over several weeks. Visitors enter through carved openings in the walls and move through dark, narrow tunnels that slowly lead towards an open courtyard at the centre of the work.

The atmosphere shifts immediately once inside. Sound becomes muted, the smell of damp earth and cloves fills the air, and the light changes constantly as it filters through openings in the structure. Morelos turns the Sculpture Court into something slower and more physical, a space where people become unusually aware of their own movement, breathing and proximity to the material around them. The installation feels monumental from the outside, yet deeply intimate once you move through it.

For years, Morelos has worked with materials that carry a direct connection to the land: clay, fibres, seeds, pigments and soil. Growing up in Tierralta in northern Colombia, a region shaped by conflict, extraction and environmental destruction, deeply influenced the way she thinks about territory and the body. Her earlier works often used natural pigments to explore violence and memory, but over time her practice became increasingly sculptural and immersive, moving towards large-scale environments that people physically enter rather than simply observe.

Across her installations, earth is never treated as passive material or scenery. It becomes something living, unstable and deeply tied to human existence. That perspective is rooted partly in Indigenous and Andean cosmologies, where land is understood less as property and more as a system of interdependence between humans, plants, animals and the environment itself. In origo, those ideas are not explained directly, they are felt through the experience of the work.

Part of what gives origo its force is its placement inside the Barbican. The estate itself was designed after World War II as a utopian vision for communal urban living, built through the hard geometry and exposed concrete of Brutalist architecture. Morelos introduces something entirely different into that environment: a porous, hand-built structure made from raw earth. The contrast between the two materials is immediate. Against the Barbican’s rigid surfaces, origo feels soft, unstable and alive. Yet the installation also responds closely to the architecture surrounding it. Its scale, enclosed spaces and monumental form echo the estate’s towers and walkways while shifting the atmosphere completely.

Morelos creates a dialogue between permanence and impermanence, between structures designed to last and a material that naturally cracks, absorbs moisture and changes over time. The work also returns the Sculpture Court to its original purpose as a public space where art becomes part of daily life rather than something sealed off inside a gallery.

Inside origo, the experience is less about looking and more about sensing. The tunnels are cool and dark, lined with compacted earth marked by the traces of handwork. Light enters only in fragments, forcing visitors to slow down and adjust to the space. At the centre of the structure, the enclosed passages suddenly open into a circular courtyard filled with daylight and air, creating a sharp release after the density of the tunnels. Morelos builds the installation around these shifts between darkness and openness, compression and stillness.

The work also continues changing throughout its duration at the Barbican. Rain darkens the clay, heat dries and cracks the surface, and the smell of spices intensifies or softens depending on the weather. Rather than treating sculpture as something fixed, Morelos approaches origo as a living environment shaped by time, climate and human presence. In the middle of London’s financial district, surrounded by movement and concrete, the installation creates a rare encounter with the physical reality of the earth itself, not as background, but as something humans remain completely dependent on.