Soil, cinnamon, and cloves fill the Barbican Sculpture Court in London, where Delcy Morelos has built origo, a 24-meter earth pavilion set against the brutalist concrete of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.
The Barbican Centre has not activated its Sculpture Court in nearly a decade. That changes with origo, a 24-meter by 18-meter earth pavilion that rises more than three meters above the brick-paved plaza. The structure takes the form of an ovular mass with multiple triangular entrances cut into its perimeter, each leading into tunnels that wind toward a central enclosure. From the residential towers above, the installation reads as a dark ring against the geometry of the courtyard. At ground level, it becomes something else entirely: a threshold between the city and something older.
Delcy Morelos built the work by hand over several weeks, pressing clay mixed with hay and seeds into the curved walls layer by layer. The surface texture that results is rough and fibrous, visibly handmade, holding the impression of her labor. Cinnamon and cloves are mixed throughout the material. The spices serve a practical function, their antifungal properties protecting the soil from decay, but they also fill the tunnels with a scent that intensifies as visitors move deeper inside. The smell of earth and spice replaces the ambient noise of the city.
Born in Tierralta, Colombia, in a region marked by armed conflict and land extraction, Morelos has spent decades working with earth as a living presence rather than inert material. Her installations draw from ancestral Andean and Amazonian understandings of land as something interconnected with human existence, carrying memory and labor and care. At the Barbican, this philosophy meets one of the most recognized brutalist complexes in the world, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a utopian vision for postwar communal life. The contrast is deliberate: poured concrete against hand-worked clay, permanence against porosity, the civic ambition of the postwar welfare state against an older relationship to the ground.
Inside origo, light drops away. The triangular openings frame distant views of the courtyard and the towers beyond, but the interior absorbs nearly everything. Sound becomes muted. The temperature shifts. Visitors moving through the tunnels find themselves aware of their own breath, their own proximity to the earth walls, the way their bodies occupy space differently when surrounded by soil. The central enclosure offers a moment of stillness before the return to the outside.
The Barbican's Sculpture Court was originally conceived as a shared public space where art could become part of daily life. Morelos returns it to that purpose while reframing what public art might mean. Her work proposes that living together extends beyond the human, that community includes the soil and microorganisms and material systems that cities are built upon and often ignore. In the middle of the City of London, three meters of earth rise to make that claim visible.
