Event details
Saturday, March 16, 2024
2–4 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register here.  

Try mixing what you think is you with the earth. Until the earth speaks to you. She speaks. And your body will listen.
—Ailton Krenak

Artist Bel Falleiros’s Soil Sessions program, Earth-Body, is inspired by the caring gesture of Delcy Morelos’s El Abrazo (2023) and the lessons of Brazilian indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak, while drawing on her own practice of creating spaces for grounding and nurturing.
 
Within an intimate and immersive soil-filled environment, Falleiros utilizes scents from Amazonian plants, her own ceramic works, and foraged natural materials to guide participants through a series of multisensory, experiential meditations. These meditations will activate the body through direct engagement with soil, breath, sound, and image in a ritualistic process, extending Morelos’s invitation to “make time to stop and feel.”
 
In Earth-Body, Falleiros encourages us to trust our innate knowledge of the natural world and renew our relationship to it—its sounds and silences, textures and matter, and smell and presence. Ultimately, can we remember that we, too, are earth?  

Participants will be asked to engage with organic materials during the program. If you have questions or concerns about allergies, please contact info@diaart.org.

Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist whose practice focuses on how contemporary constructed landscapes (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place and how that affects those who inhabit them. In 2014, she had her first solo show at CAIXA Cultural São Paulo and first residency at the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil. Since arriving in the U.S., she has worked to create spaces for grounding and connecting people, stories, nature, and place, at Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico (2016); Burnside Farm, Detroit (2017); Santa Fe Art Institute’s Equal Justice Residency, in collaboration with Tewa Women United, New Mexico (2018); Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens (2020); The Border Project, Brooklyn (2021); and 37° Panorama da Arte Brasileira, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2022). She was a More Art Engaging Artists Fellow (2021) and the artist-in-residence for the Dia Teens program (2021–22). Beyond her studio practice, she participates in collaborative projects across the Americas connecting art, education, and autonomous thinking.

About the program series 
In conjunction with Delcy Morelos: El abrazo, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

More information on the full program series is available here.