Delcy Morelos fills the Horta Hall with earth, and asks you to take off your shoes
Delcy Morelos does not think of soil as a background material. "For me, matter is alive," she says. "Earth produces and nurtures life; it is not inert." For the second edition of Bozar Monumental, the Colombian artist has built that conviction into the Horta Hall: a trapezoidal structure fourteen metres long and nine wide, made of hazel panels layered with red clay from Wallonia, sand, hay, cinnamon and cloves.
She calls it Uterus in Uterus. The form borrows from ritual architecture — Mesoamerican pyramids, Egyptian mastabas, the Amazonian maloca — but the artist describes it more plainly as a womb you can nestle into. The technique, wattle-and-daub, has been used across the Americas, Africa and Central Europe for more than six thousand years.
As with all her installations, the work has a scent designed for it. Morelos worked with the fragrance designer Nadjib Achaibou on notes of damp soil, wood, flowers and natural oils. "The piece enters your body through your nostrils," she says, "and in that moment you become one with the work."
Visitors are invited to step inside barefoot and to touch the surfaces. "To touch the earth is to be touched by her." An opening at the top lets daylight fall through Bozar's glass roof into the structure, which is where the second argument of the piece sits: marble, the material of the art deco hall all around it, comes from the same mountains as the clay. One is cold and monumental, the other warm and workable, and Morelos wants you to notice they are relatives.
The installation is freely accessible at the heart of Bozar, from 28 June to 30 August 2026.
Photos: BOZAR, Brussels