Delcy Morelos: Working with Soil to Free the Soul

“I felt that red was not just a color—I perceived it as a substance in itself which emanated from my fingers.”

Earthly Paradise (2022) and El lugar del alma (2022) are large installations where the spectator “enters” the soil. What does this sensory confrontation mean to you?

Earthly Paradise, the installation I brought to the Venice Biennale in Arsenale—a place that was initially used to store weapons—is a penetrable, fragrant, receptive, feminine, and fertile sculpture. It is also an enabler of life. It occupies the space by creating a horizon of black mixed soil, scented and sweetened with alimentary and fragrant substances.

No es un río, es una madre (2014) is a piece that shows us your connection to Indigenous cosmogonies. How do these inform your work?

I was born by the riverside of Sinú, a land fertilized by the river’s floodings. Twenty-five years ago, that mother-river was imprisoned and massacred by the construction of a large hydroelectric power plant, Urrá. The first to suffer such agonies are the locals. The Embera Indigenous people, angered and saddened, decided to say goodbye to their mother, source of nourishment and life, by embarking on a journey in small canoes from the source of the river in the mountains, at the Nudo de Paramillo, to its mouth in the Caribbean Sea, in Bocas de Ceniza. The canoes held precarious cardboard signs with writings of reverence and love. One of them read: “She is not a river, she is a mother,” showing that they know something that we, having gone through consecutive industrial revolutions, have forgotten.

As a woman and an artist, I always stop to listen to the ancestral words and the wisdom that come from the Amazon rainforest or the mud and stone huts on the peaks of the Andes. This wisdom has been flowing like a river for hundreds of years through grandfathers, grandmothers, taitas, and curanderos.¹ They are heirs to the knowledge contained in oral accounts, ceremonies, and rituals. What this knowledge shows us is how to communicate with the earth, the plants, the river, the mountain, the wind, the fire, the sun, and the moon; how we integrate that planetary and cosmic flow into our human cycles. It is through this vision of the world that we realize how the human tissue is intertwined with voices: that of the ancestors, the spirits of the mountain, the rainforest, the desert, and the ocean.

What relationship do you have with the archetype of the witch and the curandera, and how does it feed into your art?

To me, the feminine does not refer to sexual organs; it refers to a structure and a way of engaging with the world from certain specific interests: listening, nourishing, caring, the unconscious, harmony, connectivity, emotion, knowledge acquired from instinct and bodily experience. This feminine approach can be cultivated by any gender as it is, in my view, a human tendency and, furthermore, a vital one.

The witch, the woman, has always been a symbol of the type of knowledge that seeks to care for and get to know the natural world, its laws, cycles, and secrets, all powerful knowledge that the patriarchy has repressed and denigrated. The curandera knows she is taking care of herself when she takes care of her equals and her natural environment, and when she interacts with nature, as she knows she is a part of it. Feminine healing practices integrate the body with the emotions, the mind with the spirit, and they vindicate processes of self-healing and patience as ways to ally with the wisdom of the passage of time.

These archetypes have been misinterpreted and rejected, and they were burned at the stake. That is the extent of blindness, ignorance, and prejudice. The fear and arrogance—they go hand in hand—of the patriarchal labyrinth have destroyed our ancestral connection with nature. I acknowledge myself and I act from these archetypes of the female psyche, because through them I can interact in a way that is receptive and intuitive of the creative adventure.

Your work operates on two opposite poles: abjection and healing. What does this duality tell us about your way of seeing the world?

When you can look your fears in the eye, the healing process begins. Therefore, exposing the problem is part of the healing—they are two ends of the same thread. My Amazonian philosophy teacher, the native Uitoto Isaías Román, says: “In the universe, everything is knitted like a wicker basket: opposites intertwine in ever-closer knots until they can hold water.” Polar opposites intertwine into a fabric where there is no separation, and we all are, along with everything that exists, threads of that fabric that receives, contains, and constantly weaves itself.