Delcy Morelos to install origo sculpture at Barbican Centre Sculpture Court, London; first major UK project
Delcy Morelos to install origo sculpture at Barbican Centre Sculpture Court, London; first major UK project Colombian artist Delcy Morelos channels life and death in a giant earth womb | Art Basel Delcy Morelos is telling me about her neighbour who grew papaya. As part of the Colombian peace negotiations in 2016, he had received a small parcel of land near Tierralta, a tiny town in the region of Córdoba, where Morelos was born. This area of the country is notably fertile and was a territory fiercely fought over by opposing cartels and the government. He suspected that where he grew his fruit had seen a much bloodier past. ‘There was so much violence in Tierralta, and there still is today,’ Morelos says over a video call from her studio in Bogotá, the room behind her full of plants. ‘On the lands once controlled by paramilitaries, there were places where they buried their victims – students of the universities, teachers, leftists. These lands were given away after the peace deal.’ The grim situation had a profound effect on the artist. This story impacted my relationship with the land, because there were corpses down there, becoming organic matter, which was feeding plants, the fruit of which we would eat, not knowing what they had been fed by. There is a constant cycle of cannibalism in nature.’ ...