Bogotá-based Delcy Morelos envisions Madre—her new earthwork currently on view at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin—as both a mountain and a home, matter and nourishment. Combining clay, water, wood, cinnamon, and earth sown with European wheat and South American chia seeds, the work confronts visitors with a monumental and multisensory living presence.
Morelos’s previous earthworks include Earthly Paradise (Venice Biennale, 2022), El lugar del alma (Museo Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2022), and El Abrazo (Dia Chelsea, 2023). At Hamburger Bahnhof, Madre engages with the historic train station’s architecture and natural light, while also conversing with a presentation of works by Joseph Beuys drawn from the permanent collection.
Robert Preece: What were you thinking about when creating this installation?
Delcy Morelos: Lots of things passed through my head, some new and others that keep returning. The qualities of the space itself have always been important. The vaulted ceiling of the museum, previously a train station, was from the beginning a sign that I needed to follow. I have always sought to converse with each space that welcomes me, welcomes us, to establish a relationship in which affection can be freely given.
Madre is the emergence of a primal force, the form that life-giving power takes, as well as the change that happens with the passage of time, until arriving at the encounter with death. It’s matter, it’s magic.
RP: What motivated the sloped, house-like form, which also features lateral cuts in its earthen mass?
DM: I thought about the mountain as an entity and a physical phenomenon. Mountains can also be understood as houses, but in a broader, more holistic sense. In Colombia, mountains are a part of life; they determine it. At the same time, they are vertically extending border areas in which different kinds of life and ways of living proliferate.
The earth extends as much onto the museum floor as onto the walls, hugging the space. Spatial planes are folded and unfolded, life is made and unmade in living matter. Madre is a mountain made of German and European earth, which contains and nourishes South American and European seeds. It is a place to meet and be met. It has three moments that allow it to be felt up close—they are extensions of the material, inviting discovery of what’s inside, where we can feel one with it. Isn’t this perhaps what happens when our mother embraces us? Don’t we feel like part of her and at the same time whole with her? A mother’s embrace is of warmth and care, reminding us of a common origin, that we are part of a bigger whole. Madre is a mountain that gives hugs.
RP: What type of growth were you hoping for, and what have the results been so far?
DM: I carry seeds with me from the latitude in which I was born. I like to keep these possibilities of life as company, and for this reason, they are also present in many of my projects. If I am talking about the power of the encounter, it’s important to me to also conjure it through the material with which I work.
Madre contains as many seed husks from European wheat as it does South American chia seeds. Wheat went into the base of the substrate to give it body and act as nourishment, while the chia is part of its thin and living skin, a covering that changes with time. Throwing the seeds on the surface is a living, ritual act, which leads to nutrition.
RP: What are the elements that we don’t see, in terms of drainage, special nighttime illumination, and insects?
DM: There are many internal layers that one doesn’t see but that pulse with strength. The pieces are formed by the sum of matter and energy; they take time and an enormous amount of effort, matter, and movement. To make them is a ritual in which there is sacrifice and dedication, conviction and a sincere belief in the power and potential of actions that one makes with care and love. There’s mysticism in all that one doesn’t see. Eyes aren’t the most suitable channels for this type of experience—it’s the entire body in the moment of being present. For this reason, smells interest me very much, elements that escape the gaze but stimulate the experience.
I construct these pieces not only to embrace human beings; they are also open and ready for all beings who might like to get closer and inhabit them, including insects. They become temporary dwellings, resignifying the museum as a habitat for the small creatures who are always with us. I like that this happens. For me, it’s the answer to a call from the living, from life.
RP: How does Madre show us “Indigenous knowledge,” as described in the press materials?
DM: Sacred knowledge is heard and felt—I’m not sure if it’s shown. My grandmothers, Carmen Vicente and Isaías Román, through their spirit and voice of wisdom, have provided me with reflections that pulse in my body and tint each image that I sense and believe. The power to say “Madre is a mountain that gives hugs” understands that ancestral knowledge, as well as the gesture to shift the narrative toward non-human forces, toward the magic and mystery that the material contains. This knowledge is a call to live with sensitive openness, and in this context, an invitation to a new experience, that of humility toward the planet. A huge piece of earth worked in the hands of a South American woman within the Hamburger Bahnhof, which also converses with the work of Joseph Beuys, shows the power of knowledge, of the wisdom that has been shared with me and that I would like to keep sharing.
RP: How does your installation interact with the works by Joseph Beuys currently on view?
DM: The shamanic force of his work has been another ever-present element of this project. I know how much of the sacred there is in the task of art and in the earth, in the processes of creation and change. I decided to work again with earth because it contains all the elements of history, carries with it fragments of what has occurred and at the same time can take care of and nourish seeds containing the future, the life that is to come. Beuys invoked life; for my part, I propose a dialogue where the forces of change, birth, and death are always present. Madre’s shadow, for example, took over certain angles and dimensions in Beuys’s work, details in which the ritual games of creation allowed me to speak directly, to let him know it was me and that a feminine force had arrived to interact with him and his work.
RP: What reactions from visitors have you observed?
DM: Smells are what one first feels in the space, like a guide arriving before the work. Viewers know that something is happening and will happen with/in them. From the beginning of the installation process through the closing of the show, every inhabitant and visitor establishes a relationship with smell. Another thing that happens is the impulse to touch. Each piece is touched, and therefore each piece is touching those who visit. At first this was worrying, but now I am excited to know that this happens, because it reveals the physical connection that is establish. It thrills me to see how people are surprised and moved by the emergence of life in a sculpture—life is magic.
Madre is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof through January 25, 2026. Read the interview in Spanish here.